


oedipisms

by Hueyhuey



Series: big bad bright fireworks [8]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Blind Character, Body Horror, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Clint Barton is peak dumbass in this, Clint Barton's peak humor, Discussion of Morality, Eye Trauma, Heavy Angst, Hospitals, Hurt Matt Murdock, Hurt Peter Parker, Identity Reveal, Identity confusion, Kate Bishop - Freeform, Kidnapping, M/M, Major Character Injury, Michelle Jones makes a lil appearance, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker is a Little Shit, Peter Parker's Potty Mouth, Peter loves his plants, Psychological Torture, References to Depression, Religion, Religious Discussion, Team Red, Torture, Wade Wilson's colorful nicknames, i love him for it though, marxism, she's my favorite!, the eye trauma in this is like Real Intense yo, wade wilson is a dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:08:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23864299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hueyhuey/pseuds/Hueyhuey
Summary: Matt's gone.Wade waits half an hour. He double checks his regular phone for messages or calls, then he does the same with his and Peter’s burners. He calls Matt’s burner three times and his smartphone twice.Radio fucking silence.(Matt disappears after a routine training exercise with Wade and Peter. Someone's taken him. Wade's gonna take him back.)
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Peter Parker, Matt Murdock & Peter Parker & Wade Wilson, Matt Murdock/Wade Wilson, Peter Parker & Wade Wilson
Series: big bad bright fireworks [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1543033
Comments: 48
Kudos: 252





	1. the fuse is lit

**Author's Note:**

> Hey y'all, hope quarantine is treating you well. This is the first multi-chapter work for this series. It's going to contain really graphic depictions of violence and probably some very ableist/ignorant language. I'm shooting to update once every two weeks. Content warnings for specific chapters can be found in the end notes. Please read at your discretion.

It’s decided to be a bad day today. Wade discovers this only after he opens the front door of the apartment to rush to a meeting he’s late for and trips over a neat little row of painstakingly arranged tiny terracotta pots full of sprouts boasting a varied and ostentatious spectrum of green. His big toe catches the lip of the centermost pot and gravity gleefully and spitefully fucks him up.

The crash is spectacularly loud. It sends damp soil flying in every direction to grace the ceiling and walls of the landing. Wade lands on his hip and lower back, which is super fun because he’s really getting up there in years. Not even hyperfast regeneration saves him from the humiliating old man gasp that escapes his lungs.

Of fucking course the ruckus wakes Matt up. He appears in the doorway a couple of seconds before Wade has fully caught his breath and almost faceplants on top of him. Matt manages to catch himself in the nick of time and the full force of his panic-stricken inertia is stopped by the wooden door jamb, which cracks down the length of the side on which the hinges hang. 

So that’s fun. Wade’s still misremembering how to inhale. Matt carefully shifts his weight off the doorway, eyes wide and full of cautious terror. The whole thing creaks and Wade’s miserable fucking life flashes before him as he imagines being crushed by the door Flat-Stanley style. The thing has the goddamn audacity to stay on its hinges.

Fucking tease.

Wade gives up on being civilized and groans like a ninety-year-old as he disentangles himself from the mess of plants and clay shards scattered around him. Matt squats down to scrutinize one of the few pots left intact. Wade tries to sit up, but his back decides for him that the floor is a more comfortable place to be at the moment, so he curses and props himself up on his elbows to watch the proceedings.

Matt turns his head to Wade in concern for a brief moment before he picks up the pot, puts it an inch below his sniffer, and inhales what is very probably every possible scent the poor plant has to offer. Wade’s left elbow twitches with strain and just a hint of annoyance.

Matt removes the plant from his face and scowls at it, squinting with his whole brow bone. He has a little streak of dirt on his chin.

Then he pitches his torso backwards and upwards and beams the fucking thing down the flight of stairs at the end of the hall. Wade watches its fast and furious trajectory until it disappears from sight. A meaty thump and then a squawk emanates from the stairwell instead of the expected inanimate crash.

Oh, of fucking course! 

Perfect! 

Who else could it be? Who else would bother to set up a tripwire made of actual, alive fucking plants at his doorstep? The kid is so dead. “Kid, you’re so fucking dead!”

Peter’s head pops into view immediately after Wade screams at it. His shit-eating grin is almost as infuriating as those mischievous eyebrows. His shirt surfaces a second later and Wade can almost die happy, vindicated by the sight of the massive brown dirt explosion displayed prominently on his chest.

Then a fucking earthworm wriggles between Wade’s toes and all bets are off. 

Wade noogies Spidey to death and then he goes to the meeting he’s now seventeen minutes late for and then of course he apologizes about being late to his mobster client like a kiss-ass. 

Wade negotiates a deal for an hour over acidic coffee and energy drinks and a couple of lines of coke that end up going untouched. Services are bargained, cash is promised, a written agreement is drawn up, and handshakes are exchanged. 

Wade doesn’t really want to take the job but he also doesn’t really want to do much of anything else. He goes home and networks and fucks around in some government archives until he decides the dirt he’s looking for is too well buried for his skill set. He goes to Sister Margaret’s and pays Weasel way too much money to arrange yet another meeting.

The sun is down by the time he emerges from the underworld and he books it across town to be on time for the appointment he’s just made.

On the way over, he reminisces about a time he wasn’t a huge fucking sellout. Those were the days. He killed a hell of a lot more people back then. Spent a lot less money. Grovelled a lot less.

The goddamn subway gets delayed ten minutes. He barely makes the meeting, but still manages to get the dirt from the geeky, whiny computer whiz. He trudges back to the apartment. 

Matt’s already gone out. It’s his turn to cover Hell’s Kitchen and work with Peter in Queens, which means an early start. There’s a half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey on the plywood bar and a clean glass sits right next to it. A pen rests sadly beside a post-it note stuck to the bottle that reads “pour one out for me” in Matt’s overlapping handwriting. A glass identical to the one next to the bottle sits damp on the drying rack. Must’ve been a bad day in court.

Wade foregoes the glass and grabs the bottle by the neck to go marinate on the roof. He’s still got two days to finish his hit. Doesn’t really feel like offing anyone right now. 

The roof has some pills stashed discreetly in one corner, but what the fuck is the point.

Wade looks down at what’s visible of the street and takes a swig. He lies down and watches the polluted massive nothingness in the sky for a while. His brain takes advantage of the quiet to antagonize him. He tries and fails to keep his shit together and has a psychotic break for a few hours. By the time he thinks he’s safe to be around himself and other people, it’s three hours past midnight and Matt’s trying to sneak in through the roof access without alerting him.

He lets him go. There’s nothing Matt can say to make anything better. 

That’s something Wade appreciates about him. He knows exactly where Wade can be reasoned with and where it’s a lost cause. He’s usually a persistent and tenacious motherfucker, but he’s as well acquainted with his own demons as Wade is with his. He knows Wade’s boundaries better than anyone. It makes for quite a pragmatic relationship. And a lot of built-up trauma, but that was there before, so what’s the harm in adding to the burn pile?

Wade gets up and stretches his back. He checks his phone, then calls Matt and tells him not to wait up. Matt asks for how long and Wade doesn’t really know how to respond. “Gimme a week.”

Matt reminds him that he loves him. Wade knows this. He repeats it back and hangs up and throws his phone as hard as he can at the alley into which he’s been staring. It makes a very satisfying crunch and he wanders off to go find a way to get his body to make the same crunch.

When all is said and done, Wade only spends four days tearing himself apart. He’s actually pretty proud of himself when he wakes up and searches around for a calendar and finds he’s below the estimate he’d given Matt. Granted, it’s also 4:30 in the morning on a Thursday, so it’ll technically be four and a half days by the time he gets back to the apartment.

He picks up what’s left of himself and starts on the journey home.

Matt is extremely unimpressed with him when he comes trudging through the front door. He tries to apologize, tries to convey how guilty he feels, but Matt just sits silent across from him and glares at the table until he finishes talking.

Wade gets the hint and shuts up eventually. Matt leans forward on his forearms and clasps his hands. He says, “The guy you were working a job for came by yesterday.”

Aw, fuck. “What the hell? How’d he know where I live?”

Matt unclasps his hands and turns his head to face the window. The shifting red and yellow lights make his expression unreadable. He says, “I don’t know. He showed up here in the middle of the night with a couple of his lackeys and made a big show of tearing up some document and trashing the living room.”

Wade averts his gaze and winds up staring at the stairs to the roof access. “I’m sorry, Matt. I have no fucking clue how he found out about this place.”

“No, Wade, not fucking good enough. I was still half suited up when they arrived. The mask was sitting on the goddamned counter.”

“Shit, did they catch on?”

Matt deadpans at his collarbone and responds, “No, dumbass, but I had to play helpless and terrified while they threatened me in my own home. We agreed that you’d keep the merc shit out of--” He gestures to himself and then to Wade “--whatever this is.”

Wade can’t seem to make his brain and mouth cooperate. Matt continues, “I get that you need to sort your shit out. Believe me, I understand. Just maybe don’t forget that you’re intricately and inextricably attached to me. And Peter, now that I’m thinking about it. What would have happened if Peter had been here?”

Matt leans hard into the back of the chair and waits. Wade scrambles for what to say, how to communicate his guilt, his sorrow, his anger, his aching terror. He follows a still-healing scar’s pinkish path through Matt’s blonde arm hair. 

There aren’t words. He’s not a lawyer or a poet or a writer.

A weird noise escapes through his nose. Matt doesn’t acknowledge it. He sits there, patient. One of his legs starts to bounce under the table. 

Wade tries again. “I’m not good with words like you or all the people you work with. I’m sorry that I left without figuring my shit out first. I’m sorry I ran off and didn’t tell you where I was--”

“You’re a grown ass man. I don’t care about that. You know that’s not why I’m pissed.”

“Will you let me fucking finish?”

Matt snorts but nods.

“I’m sorry for a lot of shit I’ve done to you and I know it’s useless and empty to try to apologize for it all. God, I’m shit at this. We talked about accountability before I moved in, and I know that’s what I need to work on. But fuck, Red, I don’t know what to do. If you’d seen me a couple days ago…” 

“I know, Wade. It’s a hard fucking thing to balance.”

Wade pushes his chair back and stands slowly, hands braced on the tabletop. He lets his head drop. “Yeah. Hurts so fuckin’ bad.”

Matt tucks a socked foot up on the chair. He asks, “You takin’ your meds?”

Hah, meds. Hasn’t touched one of them fuckers in a solid two years. 

“‘Kay, bud, let’s maybe start there. After sleep. And a shower, probably, Christ almighty, you smell like roadkill.”

Yeah, sounds about right.

The meds help some. They’re not a be-all-end-all, but what the hell is anymore. It’s been a couple weeks since he started taking them and his head’s thinking a lot more linearly than it was and that’s progress. 

Tonight’s a cause for excitement because it’s the last Saturday of the month, which means that he and Matt get to chase Peter around the city for recon training. It’s really just a glorified game of hide and seek, but it’s good practice for Pete and it gives Matt a chance to work out some pent-up frustration on parkour instead of on criminals’ faces. 

He’s pumped to catch the kid stuck halfway between a dumpster and a brick wall, or trapped upside-down in a smokestack, or better yet clinging for dear life to some kind of spindly antenna lookin’ thing at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. All of these have happened before. Peter’s tiny and sticky and he makes for an entertaining manhunt. 

He gets to the roof first. Matt arrives after running through the high points of his Kitchen patrol. Peter’s about five minutes behind him, webbing up from an impressively steep angle below them. He’s getting real good with those web-slingers.

Wade pulls his phone out and taps around until he finds the stopwatch setting on the clock app. “We ready?” Matt asks.

Wade stands at attention and salutes. “Sir, yes, sir!”

Matt glares him down through the mask. “Save it for the bedroom, freak. Spidey, tonight we’re doin’ a manhunt. I’m knocking your prep time down ten minutes from last time, but I’m gonna give myself a handicap.” Matt pulls out a pair of foam earplugs and uses them to gesture while he talks. Peter’s vibrating with nervous anticipation. Wade thinks he can hear him humming.

“Your goal is to evade us for three hours and meet us back here at the end of that time. Wade has rubber bullets which he is free--and I’m sure more than willing--to use. I’ve got the clubs and a bo. If we tag you, you’ve lost. If you get stuck, you’ve lost. Whole city’s fair game, but I’m repeating myself at this point; you know the rules. You’ve got 35 minutes. Starting now.”

Wade starts the stopwatch. Peter scrambles for approximately two seconds before disappearing hastily over the southern edge of the building. Wade yells after him, “If you make me go to Staten Island I’m gonna throw you in the ocean!”

Matt double checks his rope bindings and turns back towards Hell’s Kitchen. He must hear something, because he mutters, “Meet me here when it’s time to start hunting,” and then he sends the line between his clubs out to catch on the building across the road. He’s gone with a graceful, gratuitous flourish. Off to beat someone into a coma in a bar alley, probably. Good time management, that is.

Wade finds a shadow to melt into and pulls out his phone to play Candy Crush. The stopwatch is still pulled up; Pete’s got another 33 minutes of calm before the storm comes biting at his ankles. 

Wade gets through four levels of Candy Crush by the time the stopwatch reads 00:34.03. Matt materializes on the other side of the roof and they exchange nods. Matt pulls his mask up a bit to insert the ear plugs. They stick out like hysterical little traffic cone Shrek ears and the effect only worsens when he slips the mask back down over them. Wade blows a raspberry at Matt-Shrek. Matt flashes his chompers and flips him off. They go their separate ways.

Peter’s a slippery little fucker, Wade will give him that. Wade doesn’t have the senses to streamline the tracking process like Matt does. He finds a length of web residue floating in the almost-still breeze and thinks hard about the physics of the swing from the spot to which it’s attached. Based on the direction and the angle, Wade hypothesizes that Peter headed south for a mile or so to throw them and then abandoned that strategy to book it east or west. Might have headed along Broadway to tire Matt out on all those tall buildings and touristy pedestrian smells. 

It’s what Wade would do. He likes to think the kid’s imprinted on him. He heads to Times Square. 

Matt’s beaten him there. He watches as that ass arcs over the throng of assorted locals and visitors. A couple of people pull their phones out to capture the moment for posterity. Matt alights on an overhang attached to some scaffolding and picks out Wade where he’s parting the crowd like Moses. He throws him a sassy little peace sign under those nasty, bloodied ropes and launches himself onwards and upwards. 

Someone’s phone camera tracks the peace sign from the empty space of its originator to Wade’s face. Seems about time to move on; Peter’s clearly long gone. 

Wade excuses himself from the mass of people growing around him and takes off down the sidewalk. A cop notices and calls out, “Hey--hey! Stop!” 

Guy’s a stupid fucker. Wade’s in the wind.

Wade doesn’t cross paths with Matt again, which must mean that one of them is on the wrong scent. He’s betting it’s not the guy with the super-enhanced sense of smell. 

Spidey stopped using the webs around five blocks ago. Wade’s got other methods to employ, though, so he hasn’t had too much trouble tracking him on foot. He’s way up in some suburb on the outskirts of the Bronx and is debating turning around or following the lead he’s on closer towards the edge of the city. Spidey’s usually too smart to corner himself like that.

But there’s a trash can knocked down in the middle of the road about 200 feet out. 

It’s worth investigating. The stopwatch says he’s got about 45 minutes. Wade trusts the stopwatch; it wouldn’t lie to him. It’s a better ally and friend than either of his red leather teammates.

Trash can’s made of concrete, 600 pounds, and it’s been tipped over like someone hip-checked it a little hard in a hurry. Wade considers it with much melodrama and vitriol. Really, it’s terribly sloppy form. Gonna have to drill mistakes like that into Pete’s head. Trash can’ll getcha killed. Trash can ain’t trustworthy like the stopwatch app on your phone.

Very important lessons to be learned tonight. Wade steps around the trash can and aims his gaze skyward, into spider territory. Nothing of interest on the roof in the immediate vicinity. He scans the windows, doorsteps, cars parked in driveways, sidewalk clutter. A car slows to a crawl behind him and flashes its brights, so he steps out of the middle of the road to let it pass. His eyes are drawn to its retreating back bumper and the sewer access cover in its wake.

Bingo. Pete’s slimy adversaries spend a lot of time in them bitches. Would absolutely be somewhere with which that freaky kid would be familiar enough to hide in. 

It’s plain nasty, though. Matt’s gonna have a bitchfit. Speaking of, where is he? He’s usually got Peter bagged an hour in. 

Must be the earplugs. Wade checks the stopwatch; it reads 03:03:09.17. Half hour left. He hefts the sewer access aside. It’s not difficult or rusty at all, must have been recently moved. He climbs down.

Peter tries so hard to escape, but it’s only ten minutes until a misplaced footfall reveals his location and then another five of high-speed chasing before Wade manages to tag him with a bullet to the leg. Peter yelps and goes down, protecting the leg from impact. Wade screams, “I win!” and bellyflops all over him. 

Wade sits up, straddling Peter and grinning down at him. “You owe me shitty Mexican takeout, bitch!”

Peter takes the mask off to pant hard. His eyes are watery and his face is all screwed up in pain. He says, “You didn’t have to use the bullets, man. Think you broke something.”

“You’ll walk it off. S’payback for makin’ me wallow around in the sewer,” Wade tells him. He shifts into a more comfortable position so that Peter’s hip bones aren’t digging into his ass.

Peter’s eyes roll back in his head and he taps out on Wade’s thigh. “Uuuugh, get off, you’re hurtin’ me.”

Wade stands and shines his phone light around the space. There's a ladder for another sewer access not too far from them. He points the light down at Peter’s squinting face. “Roll over and lemme check the leg. We need to wait a couple of minutes to see if Sergeant Lucifer shows up, anyway.”

Peter adjusts his position so that Wade can palpate the place where his lower thigh meets his knee. He flinches away violently when Wade’s fingers ghost over the site of the hit from the rubber bullet. Wade puts a bit of pressure on it and Peter jerks away, crying out with indignation. Wade shushes him and feels around for--yep. “Knocked a shard off your kneecap. Put your hand here--yeah, on top of mine, right there, gentle--feel that? Got yourself some nice pointy bone shrapnel.”

Peter glares at him through teary eyes and says, “I’m not gonna be able to walk, you fucking penis.”

“Woah, kiddo, check that filthy little rat mouth before I scrub it out with sewer water. It’ll be okay, you’ll be fine in a few days.”

“How am I gonna get out of here?”

Wade narrows his suit eyes at him. “You’re fucking joking. How many limbs do you have?”

“...Four.”

“How many of those are currently functional? How many are sticky? How many can shoot goddamn spider silk? How many are--”

“Okay, point taken, Christ. I’m not getting you any Mexican, though.”

Yeah, that’s understandable. “Kiddo, if you figure out how to get up the ladder without my help, I’ll buy you Mexican every day for a month.”

“Oh, you’re on, old man.”

Spidey makes it over to the ladder and up into the night with minimal complaint and way too much bravado, so now Wade owes him about $300 of Mexican takeout.

The kid’s all tuckered out after a couple of blocks of hobbling, so Wade scoops him up and calls Dopinder. He’s asleep. Wade uses way too much data to download the Uber app and orders one of those instead.

The driver side-eyes Wade the whole time he’s helping Spidey into the car. When Wade gets in and closes the door, the lady turns her head to look at the road and willfully ignores him while he nags at Peter to buckle his seatbelt. Wade feels obligated to apologize for the smell of sewage and the driver tells him not to worry about it in a dissociative monotone.

It’s awkward. He misses Dopinder. Peter falls asleep halfway there with his head on Wade’s lap. Wade tips the lady an extra $50 on the app thingy when they get out.

He ends up carrying Peter the whole way back to the rooftop because he doesn’t want to wake up all the way and because his leg won’t bear any of his weight. The kid’s had worse, but that doesn’t mean he’s not hurting right now. He’s allowed to wuss out tonight. Wade’s starting to worry about whether he might have done some more serious damage by the time they reach the roof.

Matt’s not there.

It’s not that late. They were supposed to meet back here to debrief and run through the highlights of the activity. Wade checks his stopwatch; he’d stopped it at 03:35:23.73. They’d spent an hour and a half making their way back. Matt isn’t the kind of person to flake on them. 

Wade waits half an hour. He double checks his regular phone for messages or calls, then he does the same with his and Peter’s burners. He calls Matt’s burner three times and his smartphone twice. Radio fucking silence.

Peter wakes up and asks him what’s going on. Wade doesn’t know how to answer that. He has Peter let his aunt know that he’s staying the night and they go back to the apartment to regroup.

Wade knows something’s wrong as soon as they reach the front door of the building. The kitchen window light is on and visible. He knows they’d turned it off before going out because Matt had bitched at him about the annoying buzz and ranted about energy conservation for a solid minute. The light is on now and swaying behind the pane above the sink. 

Taunting him. 

He adjusts Peter carefully and puts his free hand on the holster at his side before hip-checking the door in and heading upstairs.

Someone’s broken in. The front door’s torn off its hinges along the fault line from the morning of the plant tripwire prank. Inside everything is torn to pieces. The peninsula in the kitchen has been ripped from its base. The breakfast table is missing three legs. Myriad clothes and several spare canes have been pulled from the bedroom and scattered precariously around the space.

The linen closet under the stairs is trashed. The trunk containing Matt’s gear is empty and has been artfully arranged on the coffee table so that its interior is visible. One of the canes leans against it, pointing to the inside, which is illuminated by the light over the kitchen sink. Spray painted on the bottom in neon orange marking paint are the words “SEE YOU NEVER”.

Matt’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: discussion of self-harm Wade Wilson style, broken bone, manhunt-style chase.


	2. here comes the boom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is incredibly graphic, please please please heed the warnings in the end notes!

Matt wakes up.

It’s wrong. Everything is wrong. The world feels like it’s been pumped full of ketamine. It’s sluggish and inverted, tilts back and forth like a boat stranded in the open ocean during a windy storm. His head throbs angrily. There’s some kind of sedative coursing leaden and molten lava through his screaming veins.

He’d been chasing Peter’s tail across northern Manhattan last he remembers. Definitely not still doing that. The back of his head presses against something unforgiving as a reminder. He’s been knocked unconscious (or tranquilized, more likely) and then moved against his will. Now he’s somewhere walled off, stuffy and static with stale, humid air. He’s sat propped up against what feels like a cylindrical concrete column.

He tries to move but his progress is halted by the harsh coils of a heavy chain constricting his torso. It has his arms pinned tight to his chest. The chain pushes some air out of his lungs as it tightens. Seems to be anchored to whatever he’s leaning against, but his surroundings are still too scrambled to make out many specifics.

He tenses his legs, but they’re also restrained. He can’t quite pin down the material, so he shifts to try to get a better sense of it. The stuff makes a horrible squeaking sound, and he realizes it’s some sort of saran wrap and duct tape concoction wound tightly from his ankles to his mid-thigh. He turns his head to--oh. That’s new.

His mask is gone.

His mask is gone and there’s nothing covering his face.

He snarls against the feel of the bitter, wet air over his cheeks. It’s so, so wrong. 

He closes his eyes to push away the intrusion of the damp, almost imperceptible wind.

He tests his hands’ range of motion, but they’ve been crushed against his lower abdomen by the chains. His muay thai wrappings are gone and his knuckles sting with split skin and the abrasive, microscopic grazes of road rash. He tries to kick out with his feet. No dice. 

There’s something else--some other article of clothing draped over the black shirt of the suit. It interacts with the rough texture of the concrete column and the metal chain weirdly, but he can’t pin it down. Slippery? Not quite. Not wet either. His head sways. Dizzy. Blurry.

He shoves his upper body forward, up, down. He tries to wiggle one leg so that it crosses over the other to give his ankles some relief from the pinch of cut-off circulation. With every movement, the chains dig painfully into the material of the top half of the suit and that strange, silken fabric in a manner reminiscent to the time Castle lashed him to a chimney on that rooftop. 

Silken. 

What the hell is it? Why are the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end?

Matt inhales hard. He smells familiarity. The piece of clothing reeks of old sweat and broken-in combat boots. Smells simultaneously worn in and neglected. There’s a couple of cheap dyes in there and a muted wave of burnt plastic. If only his damn head would stop pounding. If only he could get a full breath in without strangling himself. 

He tries slouching hard and that affords him a better angle from which to draw oxygen into his lungs. He gasps in as much air as he can and the memory hits him like a fucking mack truck: his dad’s boxing robe. 

Why the fuck is he wearing his dad’s boxing robe; no, hold on, that’s not the question. Who the fuck took it from where it’s been stored, unmoved, for fucking years?

No one knows about that. There are approximately--exactly--probably--maybe--eight people who know him in and out of the mask. He trusts them all completely. None of them would ever drug him and fucking take his father’s robe and--

Castle knows about the mask. Does Castle know about the robe? They’ve spent enough loved ones’ death anniversaries angry and blackout drunk and trying to kill each other all over the roofs of Hell’s Kitchen, spilling frustrated and grieving into Matt’s apartment for more alcohol and a break from the violence. Castle can’t know about the robe in the trunk in the closet. Right?

For a second he entertains the idea that it’s Castle. No, no, it couldn’t possibly be him. Not his style. Whoever tied him up wants him to stay where he is. Wants him to feel it. To simmer in knowing that he can’t get out, that he’s been caught. Deer in the headlights, freight train hurtling towards where he’s tied down to the irons of train tracks. Red hands captured from his desperate sinner’s prayer and brought before God for judgment.

He’s well and truly trapped. Someone hunted him and caught him and now he’ll die. Without a mask, smothered by the dewy, tepid air that is wholly unfamiliar and infinitely punitive.

The coward in him prays for it to be over quickly. 

Panic starts to edge into his mind. There doesn’t appear to be anyone around. He can’t hear Hell’s Kitchen outside. The sounds of the city are very, very, very far away. He can’t smell the omnipresent mass of humanity, can’t taste the harsh tang of polluted New York City air. He can barely make out the sound of the pulsing, writhing heart made up of millions of people and their infinite tapestry of white noise. It’s overpowered by the obnoxious drone of cicadas and the rush of interstate traffic nearby.

He pushes again against the chains binding his arms to his chest. Almost passes out.

Gets his breath under control and tries harder.

Some time passes. Maybe ten minutes, maybe fifty, maybe a couple of hours. It’s enough for his head to clear some more, enough for him to map out the space in which he’s imprisoned. The walls are farther away than he’d initially thought. The place echoes like a warehouse or a large storage unit. The roof is sturdy and somewhere between thirty to fifty feet above him. The only infrastructure appears to be a couple of weight-bearing columns spaced evenly down the center of the building--it’s definitely a building, not a converted pole barn--and the steel rafters supporting the roof. He’s shackled militantly to the northern-most column. The buzz of sodium-vapor lamps outside harmonizes with the free-swinging fluorescents overhead.

The time lends his senses clarity and his fogged-up head a little bit of calm. He tries to meditate. To settle his jackhammering heart and push down the bile rising in his throat from whatever smell is wafting in through an open window behind him. His head desperately wants to clear.

After a while, he starts trying to escape his binds with increasing fervor. He knows it’s fruitless, but every time he tells himself he’s going to give up, an ever-critical voice in the back of his head speaks up to tell him to get his ass in gear. 

That voice haunts his dreams. It contorts them into malicious, omnipotent nightmares that unfurl like fractals in his defenseless subconscious. It’s made up of his dad, who always knows the perfect way to twist the knife to motivate him when he’s almost down for the count. It’s made of Stick, who knows the perfect way to gaslight him until he can do nothing but force himself to push through the smoke and mirrors. It’s made of the overlapping and tireless voices of his worst college professors, of courtyard bullies, the stolid tenor of Father Lantom, Marci Stahl’s college likeness. It’s a unified and immovable cry to action and he has no choice but to obey it, to brace against the steady bruising vice grip on his ribs and to push through the numb ache encroaching on his lower legs. 

Another voice catches him off-guard as he’s attempting to contract his thighs in another of endless desperate bids to snap the saran wrap. This voice is halfway between breathy and world-weary and it’s not confined to the inside of his skull like the other one. It sneaks up on him. Seems to have crept in through the only door available in the place, which is located immediately in front of him and on the other side of the south column.

The voice says, “Hey, you’re awake. Hope your noggin’s not too scrambled. Took a nasty fall after I hitchya.”

Matt hears the voice--man, probably, but it’s a guess, the pitch is ambiguous--approaching in tandem with sneaker-clad footfalls. He tries to direct his traitorous gaze at the ground. The fucking lights are going to give him away if his captor hasn’t figured it out already. 

The guy stops about eight feet away from Matt. He’s got something around his waist; it smells like year-old sweat and used leather shoes and steel. Some sort of belt.

God, his head hurts. He thinks it might be nice if it could split down the middle, to relieve the pressure.

The man grabs at the right side of the belt and extracts something. Weighty, hard, processed wood, worn-in metal, top-heavy; pounds it in his palm--hammer. Hammer from his belt. It’s a tool belt. Matt flinches away from the slapping of metal on flesh. The guy chuckles and does it harder. His heart rate jumps in interest when Matt flinches again. 

Matt’s head pounds to the beat of the hammer.

The guy does a fancy trick with the handle--the effect is lost on Matt’s addled and rattling skull--and tucks it back into its pocket on the belt. He seems to ponder something, and then he strolls behind the column to fiddle with the chains.

Matt concentrates hard on the tool belt as the guy crouches to inspect. There’s the hammer, beside it a length of some steel wire. Smells factory-precision sharp. Other side now: some pliers, something with a powerful, serrated blade--modified combat knife. Tastes like the edges of the machetes issued to certain members of the Hand. Last thing has a smokey, wooden handle and smells like charred animal byproduct. He twitches his head back to try to get its shape and the guy notices. He gives a hard, pointed tug on the chains and Matt can’t breathe. Can’t even try. Ribs stop working, open spiderweb fractures from past breaks and turn in against his lungs.

The guy keeps the tension while he talks: “You’re not gettin’ outta these chains, bucko. I've been watching you. I know how you tick. You just sit there pretty while we get underway, yeah?”

He tugs hard on the chains one last time and then releases abruptly. Matt gasps in disgusting, watery air and coughs it up. The man stands, makes a disgusted noise. Walks away between the sounds of Matt’s heaving, drowning, too-empty lungs.

The guy exits through the big door at the south side of the building. Matt takes a moment to close his eyes and tilt his head back. He tries to shift so the freshly tightened chains aren’t digging so hard between his fragile ribs. He coughs again.

His head clears a bit more. He throws his focus outside and finds the guy rummaging around in some sort of vehicle. It’s shadowy and cool out there. It’s not the Kitchen, although he already knows that. His captor pulls his head out from the cab of the truck and pushes himself up from where he’s braced against it.

The guy’s got--Jesus, Matt can’t make it out. Some sort of metal folding thing. Maybe a table, tray, chair. Other hand holds more chains, something that might be a combination lock. On his shoulder sit a couple of cantankerous, uncooperative ratchet straps that whisper in frayed edges and rusty hardware. Matt's captor starts to head back in the direction of the building. Halfway there, the straps unravel to fall all over the ground and the guy curses under his breath as he picks them up. 

Matt takes advantage of the brief intermission to try to worm his hand into a better position. He’s mapping the path of the chain around his trunk and picking out the weak points in the constraints on his legs when the sound of the man approaching cuts him off. The man stops a couple of meters away, drops his supplies, and crouches so that he’s eye-level with Matt. Matt aims his jaw down, as if defeated. The man’s observant; he takes note of the new, cramped position in which Matt’s hand is folded into his abdomen.

“Come on now, I gave you more than enough time to make a break for it. You had a whole hour!”

Matt keeps his head aimed at the ground. He glares.

The man waits. He tires of crouching and shifts so he’s sitting, legs crossed one over the other like it’s an elementary school group. 

Matt gives in and asks, “Why am I here?” His voice catches on the last word and it sends him into a full-blown coughing fit. His ribs dig like thorns into his chest and his lungs beg for more air.

The man waits until the coughing has largely subsided before he responds. “What, not even going to introduce yourself? Harsh, man, harsh.” He stretches languidly over his crossed legs, popping a joint in his left arm and shifting into a new position. He continues, “Guess I haven’t done that either. Let’s start over, eh? S’good to see you. Name’s Abe. Not sure you remember me. Might have bumped that outta your skull when I caught you.”

The hair on the back of Matt’s neck starts to stand up again. He tilts his head to get a read on the guy. Furrows his brow, bemused.

“Ahh, you gettin’ it? Yeah, you’re a smart guy. You remember representin’ me? I was one of the guys you brought in, too. In the mask, I mean. Bet you ain’t remember that. I hadn’t done nothin’ wrong ‘cept deal some goddamn weed, man.” 

The guy’s voice is getting louder. The friendly facade slips faster. His presence balloons, fills the cavernous space. He starts to raise his voice, cries, “Matt Murdock, huh? Remember when your sorry ass fuckin’ failed at your job? Remember when I went to prison for my whole life ‘cause of you? Huh?” Spit flings itself from the guy’s--Abe’s--mouth and lands on Matt’s brow. 

Matt pushes himself back as hard as he can against the wall. Says placatingly, “Hey, Abe, I’m sorry for what happened to you. I tried my best. I do remember you.”

It’s true, too. Matt remembers Foggy slapping the puny file down on his desk and telling him to deal with it, that he had some extra pro bono hours to fill so he took the case. He remembers, buried deep under other memories years old, covered in the iron grip of a younger Wade, building rubble, and the touch of Elektra. He remembers all the cases that slipped through his fingers. He remembers falling out of rhythm with Foggy, the dying hope in the face of a younger, less resentful Abe as Matt told him there was no option but to plead guilty. 

Matt remembers breaking into an office building months before that, finding Abe’s unconscious body sprawled over thousands of dollars of drug money. He recalls chasing the other half of that deal for weeks, finding a cold trail in the shape of a bullet wound in a head.

Matt remembers thinking about Abe’s case as he’d let Midland Circle come crashing down on top of him. About how it had signified the beginning of the end.

Abe fumes. He huffs out, “Yeah, well it ain’t fucking good enough. Sorry wasn’t what got me out of prison. Sure as hell ain’t gonna be what saves you.”

Without warning, the hammer exits its designated space in Abe’s toolbelt and crashes into the chains gripping Matt’s abused ribcage. The world blanks out as the healing hairline fractures in two of his ribs give out. He fails to breathe once, twice, gulps in a half second of air before the hammer smashes in the adjacent ribs on the other side. Matt thinks Abe is yelling, but he can’t hear anything save the grinding crunch of failing bone structure. The chain slides against and into the space where his ribs used to be and Matt can’t breathe at all. None of the oppressive, wet breeze reaches his throat.

His hearing comes back all at once. He can hear his lungs failing, trying to take impossible, unreachable breaths. Abe is still yelling. “--goddamned mask! Everyone shoulda known who you were! Didn’t take me more’n a coupla fuckin’ weeks to figure it out!” Abe stomps to the other side of the cylindrical column. He’s hysterical, muttering under his breath, “Matt Murdock, Man in the Mask, Daredevil, Red, s’all the fuckin’ same piece of shit blind bastard!” With every name, Abe gives a hard tug on the chains. Somehow he’s tightening them even more. Matt can hear the crank of the old ratchet straps going as the metal digs deeper and deeper into him.

He gets a little bit of air in after Abe’s done with his list of names. Matt holds it as best as he can while Abe gives a final crank. Bone shifts against tissue and Matt loses control, screams all the air out like it’s fire. Maybe Abe screams back. He loses consciousness.

Coming to is the piercing, staticky jab of a million needles working their way into his lungs. He opens his eyes and hiccups in a breath, cries out at the way his ribs jar. It’s only by the grace of God that both of his lungs still work.

The chains are looser. They’re still very much there, snaked around the bruised, broken, bleeding mess of his torso. Still sitting in spaces where bone should be. Squeezing, but not cutting off his air.

Abe’s back to sitting a couple of meters away. The hammer rests in its spot on the belt. Its head is tangy with broken fabric, skin cells, fresh blood.

Matt tries again to breathe. Slow, purposeful, like Stick drilled into him. Abe watches but makes no move to intervene. He doesn’t speak. 

Matt gives himself sixty seconds to breathe. When it’s over, he leans his head back to rest against the column. He turns it to face Abe. Fakes eye contact through the swimming, dizzy feeling inside his head. Abe’s heart rate picks up; he’s ready to get back to it. He straightens up and takes a breath in to speak and Matt starts up a fresh prayer in his head.

“Can’t be blacking out on me, Matt. I’ve got a lesson to teach you and it’s really very rude to be falling asleep in the middle of a lecture li--”

Matt miscalculates his next breath and bone grinds hard enough to make him cry out. A wave of frustration rolls off of Abe, but he waits until Matt stops making involuntary exclamations of pain. When the needles subside, Matt doesn’t bother with eye contact. He closes his eyes and returns the back of his skull to its place on the column.

Abe picks up. “I’d really appreciate it if you could try not to interrupt. Just for, like, a minute. I wanna tell you a story. Deal?”

Matt nods microscopically. 

“So picture me, or I guess think about me, whatever the hell you do, you fucking bat. Say I’m ten years younger. Just graduated high school; I was the first person in my family to do that, you know? Even got a scholarship to CUNY. I wanted to major in international relations, to make real, legitimate change on a global level.

“But winter break of my first semester I went and got hooked on pills. God, my life went to shit faster’n I ever thought was possible. My folks found out, kicked me out on the street. The only person I could think to turn to was my dealer. He hooked me up with a short time gig running weed for some mobsters working for this big ass bald guy.

“I figured I could get some cash under my belt, pull myself up by my bootstraps, kick the pills. I wanted to go back to college, to give my folks a reason to be proud of me. I still had hope, y’know? But then, Jesus, it was my second week on the job and the buyer got spooked and knocked me out with a crowbar. I woke up in the back of a cop car and the guy driving told me that Daredevil was to blame.”

Abe unpretzels his legs and leans back on his hands. Matt keeps his eyes closed and uses Abe’s measured breaths to stay grounded. 

Abe continues, “So then I get all excited when your partner shows up and tells me that my case has been picked up. And don’t get me wrong, I ain’t got nothing against blind people, but you were a pretty shit lawyer. So I got put away. 

“Got out on good behavior, no thanks to you. I think I’ve got my life planned out by this point. Went back to baldy and found out he’s been gone for a while, but the guys who took his place were willing to take me on. 

“So I’ve got all this righteous fury and pent up rage, and my new gig offers me some pretty sweet fuckin’ scheduling deals. I’ve been making the most of that time. Been doing some recon on you. Figured out pretty quick that you and the guy running around on rooftops without eye holes in his mask were the same person. Got me to thinking; you failed me twice. First time was leaving me there, bleeding from the head, for the cops to pick up like old meat. Second time was in the courtroom, ‘course.

“And I got into your apartment, too. You leave the roof access unlocked all the goddamn day, wasn’t even that hard. I stole a couple of things to play it off as a burglary. But I found your trunk full of vigilante bullshit and that old boxing robe. Thought it might be nice for them to find you draped in your old man’s colors.”

Matt’s having a hard time processing Abe’s words. What colors? He hasn’t seen colors in a long time.

“And you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’d do to you. What’s the best way to make you feel the pain that I feel every single second of my fucking life? And I think I figured it out. Ya see, I figure you don’t really need ‘em anyway.”

Abe stands. Walks forward, crouches before Matt.

Matt’s felt a lot of pain in his time. He knows where it hurts worst to get stabbed, to be shot, which bones crack hardest where. He knows that he’d rather die on land than in the watery depths of the Hudson or the East. He’s been crushed to death by a skyscraper and resurrected by the devil for further punishment.

None of that prepares him for what it feels like when Abe grabs him by the back of the scalp, throws his head to heaven, and plunges a carving fork into his right eye.

The pain is the culmination of every trauma his scarred, beaten body has ever experienced. It’s the melting acid of the accident that blinded him, a sudden explosion of agony, of writhing interminable stinging screaming empty numb pain. Matt’s brain hallucinates white-hot burning fireworks for the first time in decades and he’s screaming. He’s screaming louder than he’s ever screamed before while Abe digs harder, deeper, and severs the useless, broken globe from its equally useless nerve and empties the socket.

And then it’s the left side and it’s so much worse. The invasive, tearing terror multiplies, superfluous and wretched with rotten revenge. Matt runs out of air but his vocal cords continue to push something through them because he can’t see and this is the end.

Matt can’t see.

He can’t--

Can’t see.

The world is a vast, impenetrable nothing. It’s just like the first time: paralyzing horror, loss of the sense of existing, but there’s no dad to ground him here, he’s not nine years old, and there’s only the stabbing of the tines reverberating in his skull to feel for forever. 

And then it’s over, the carving fork is gone, but the aching void in Matt’s head is infinitely more terrible than the immediacy of the pain he’s just experienced. Blood and salty water clog his nose and Abe takes a moment to gain his composure before starting in on Matt’s ribs with brutally aimed kicks.

Matt gives into the pull of unconscious, drifts blessedly away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: graphic depictions of bodily torture, broken bones, psychological torture, discussion of drug addiction, ableist language, violence inflicted on facial features, discussion of death.
> 
> Please read at your discretion!


	3. lit up the sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, heed the tags and the warnings. Please be safe.

Clint’s in hick territory. He knows this because the stench of gutter urine and urban detritus has transitioned rather elegantly into the homely aroma of cow patties. Reminds him of growing up running through dairy pastures under the blazing hot sun in the middle of buttfuck plains America. Or train rides on adrenaline-framed runaway nights, or the high of circus performances and daring stunt work. The setting sun lends credence to the memories.

Real nostalgic and all, but he’s got a trail to follow and the smell is kind of distracting him from that. He pulls his attention back to what’s immediately before him. 

He’s hitched a ride on the back of a poorly secured eighteen wheeler from the suburbs of the city along I-87 into deeply rural midstate New York. Not a lot of missions as of late have taken him out so far from civilization, so he’s excited to get a taste of the countryside. Hell, maybe he’ll scope out a nice spot to plan a camping trip with Kate while he’s out here; the kid could afford to shed some tension.

His target is some low-level nobody felon who’s been just on the wrong side of too active around the outskirts of the mob in the southern Manhattan-Brooklyn area. A real scumbag; been bagging bodies for hitmen and running sex trafficking schemes back and forth between various families. Clint got called up to deal with him when it became apparent that he was stocking artillery for some sort of targeted attack. Should be a one-night job. Clint doesn’t have the time or amount of sleep required for a long-haul recon mission. 

The guy’s been obsessively stalking a couple of local vigilantes, which is a relatively recent shift in his behavior. He’s also been leaving the city consistently for days on end. One of the higher ups at the agency to which Clint’s contracted thinks the guy might be planning a bombing at one of the various enhanced person strongholds scattered around the city. Whatever the threat, Clint’s getting paid to track him down, so track him he will.

He hops out of the trailer while the trucker is inside a gas station chowing down on room-temperature hot dogs. It’s dark as all hell. His duffle feels a lot heavier than it did when he started out, but he chalks that up to caffeine withdrawal and hops a low fence after hitching the thing higher onto his shoulder. 

Last he saw of the pickup he’s been tracking, it was turning down a private road about a quarter mile from the station. He manhandles some barbed wire fencing into submission to cross into a field of corn. It’s very horror movie-esque. Would be a good prank to pull on Kate after this. 

Headlights pull Clint’s attention north. 500 yards away, give or take. Powerful, tinted blue. A newer model or recently updated. Definitely the one he’s been following. He hadn’t caught the brand or make during the day but he knows it’s white and mudstained and lifted to high heaven. 

Clint follows the headlights as they slice the silhouetted corn stalks and disappear past the northeast corner of the field. He marches on for a couple of minutes and finds the northern edge of the corn. The road is made of gravel and limerock and it’s absolutely deserted. The truck’s tail lights are nowhere to be found. The pockmarked surface stretches interminably into the dark distance. 

Looks like he’s in for a bit of a walk.

“Jesus, who the hell decided that backroads could be so long” is what’s going through Clint’s head by the time he finds the first driveway. It’s been damn near an hour and he’s been jogging reluctantly since the thirty minute mark.

Should have brought those capri suns he’s got sitting on his counter. Better yet, the six pack of Coors hanging out next to them. 

He stops to pant into the cooling air and give his right side a break from the bag. The only sound his aids have picked up on in the past couple of miles is the infuriatingly monotonous buzzing of frogs, or cicadas, or whatever those things that eat crops are called. Everything else is still and silent and muggy like it’s just rained. 

Clint breathes deep for a minute or so, and then picks the bag back up and turns down the drive. His eyesight ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at, but he can’t see the house anywhere within the quarter mile of visibility he has down the drive. Here’s hoping that this is the right place.

It’s not the right fucking place. He jogs for another mile before the house comes into view, and when he gets close enough to see the carport protecting the decades-old Volkswagen bug and the collection of sheep in the backyard, he huffs and turns around. 

It’s another half hour of excruciating running-turned-power-walking before another drive appears. This one looks promising; the property is enclosed by a fence topped with angry looking razor wire, the mailbox sways precariously in the nonexistent breeze, and the sign zip-tied to the gate blocking the path threatens the use of some sort of gun in the event that anyone should take it upon themselves to trespass. Clint sets his duffle down to grab a camping knife out of one of the pockets. He slices through the zip ties and takes the sign as a souvenir. Thing’s gonna look metal as hell bungeed to the door of his fridge at home.

There’s a new noise as well. It’s another, lower-pitched kind of buzzing, and he plays with his aids to see if it’ll make itself known. It clears up a bit; sounds like steady car traffic, but he can’t pinpoint the direction from which it originates.

He tosses the duffle over the gate and climbs in its wake.

This driveway is even longer than the one previous, and Clint is desperately out of breath by the time he finds its end. It branches into two paths that border a giant, ancient barn which is lit up like a damn beacon. The razor wire fencing is long gone, replaced by rows upon rows of trees that border the barn about 300 feet out.

The road noise is much clearer now, and the screeching of whatever that small crop-eating bug is mingles with it discordantly. Nothing else moves or makes a sound. The barn is as still and silent as its surroundings.

Clint creeps into the treeline, puts the bag down, and crouches next to it to unzip it.

The sound of something hard hitting something soft reaches him and the raw-throated scream that follows it pulls his head up to look.

There’s someone in there. More than one someones. The hanging lights illuminating the exterior sway a little but don’t flicker. Clint quickens his prep. 

Something happens while he’s looking down because when he glances back up one of the outside lights is out and there’s another sickeningly fleshy thud and then that elicits another scream, much louder and harder-edged than the last one.

This one’s followed by a torn up “please” that’s barely loud enough to register from his vantage point. 

He tosses the quiver over his shoulder, straps a couple of combat knives into their holsters, and nocks an arrow. 

The building is sturdy but old. It stands about 40 feet high and the only apparent entrances are the closed windows directly below the roof on each side and one large sliding door. The door is open wide enough for someone to slip in, but given how brightly the space is lit up, Clint doesn’t want to risk discovery before assessing the competition. He makes his way to the other side of the building under the cover of the moonshadows cast by the trees. 

Bingo. Open windows. He’s even got his pick of the whole back row. How considerate. 

Another thud and another cry. This one sounds gargled and hollow, like there’s no impact behind it. There’s a pinched off exclamation from a new voice, a soft tenor that Clint strains to hear.

S’weird, Clint hadn’t noticed more than one person in the truck he’d been tracking on the way out here. He hasn’t seen any other cars anywhere on the property, either. But there are definitely two people in there.

Oh, how ominous this situation bodes.

He tracks some holds on the weathered board siding and scales the wall with the help of a grappling arrow. Balancing on the window is easy money. The height lends some clarity to his mind; he’s got a bird’s eye view of the goings-on inside from here. 

Inside is pretty barren. There are a couple of central columns blocking his sightline down the middle, and it’s obvious there’s someone chained to the far side of the one closest to him. He can see the edges of the toes of combat boots peeking out and a bloodied hand braced around the side of the column visible to him.

There is a padlock that is easy to identify from his position, and a couple of ratchet straps tangled up in the chains.

There’s a foldable table a few yards away from the chained column. It holds some rope, several yard tools, and the same kind of razor wire from the perimeter fence. 

Another impact. The hand disappears from this side of the column. The person who’s chained up doesn’t even scream. The combat boots roll out of view. The person doing the hitting pants into the quiet and lands another blow. 

A big guy steps into view and Clint gets a good look at him. Definitely his mark. He’s wearing the same clothes and everything. Well, except for the good pint of drying blood that stains the front of his shirt and pants reddish-black. Mister Abuser turns to the table of fun medieval torture devices and reaches for the wire and, yeah. It’s time to intervene.

Clint does some quick thinking and sends an explosive arrow flying into the welcoming branches of a tree on the edge of the clearing behind him. The thing ignites and the whole barn shakes with the impact of the explosion.

Mister Abuser whips around to the windows and Clint ducks out of sight. He hears a muttered curse and risks a peek inside. He catches sight of the tail end of a sprinting sneaker on its way out the big door. The bait seems to be working; that arrow will buy him maybe two minutes before his mark catches on.

Clint shimmies his way into the barn and rappels down the wall. When his feet hit the ground, the person who’s chained up makes some kind of noise. Less than a groan, really. It sounds empty. Directionless. Clint makes his way to the column, one eye on the big door. He can still hear the flames roaring outside.

He knocks the folding table over for shits and giggles, then turns to assess the situation attached to the column.

Oh fuck.

Of course the guy lashed to the pillar is his goddamned lawyer. Murdock looks like hell. He’s draped in an ancient, bloody, and torn-to-shit boxer’s robe. Guy’s bleeding in several places, but what freaks Clint out is the fact that his mark--the perp--seems to have done something to Murdock’s face. There are slow-moving rivers of blood sliding down his cheeks like tears, and there’s something wrong with his eyes. 

Ain’t Murdock blind? The hell’s wrong with his eyes?

Clint double-checks that Beefy Shitface is still occupied. He sends another explosive arrow whistling through the window to make nice with its compatriot in the tree. The shock of the impact causes Murdock to flinch.

Okay. Only got a minute. First step. What’s the first step? 

Those chains need to go. Sure nice of his mark to leave a pair of fatass bolt cutters hanging out among the scattered mess of the folding table’s contents. Clint tries not to think about what he’d been planning to do with those. 

When Clint crouches to get leverage against one of the chain links, he can hear Murdock’s ragged, busted breathing. He seems to be passed out or close to it. Clint’s currently banking on the fact that he hasn’t gone into shock or worse, but considering the blood loss and freaky face trauma, that’s looking less likely. 

The chain breaks and he gets to work on loosening it. Murdock tenses and cries out as it shifts. Clint shushes him, says, “Hey, man. It’s Barton. I’ve gotta get you out of this, need you to be quiet.” He checks his six for any sight of his mark while he works on unwinding the chain. He can’t have too much longer. Needs to be thinking of another strategy for distraction. He could barricade the door, close the windows, but he worries that might incite the guy to use the truck as a battering ram. He doesn’t think there’s much of a chance of getting Murdock to stand on his own, and there ain’t no way he’s gonna be able to lift him safely through those windows. 

He encounters a tight point at Murdock’s torso where the chain crosses over itself a couple of times. It seems to be stuck on something, and it refuses to slide one way or the other. He gives a bit of a tug to the right and, jesus fucking christ, it comes free to the tune of the sickening crunch of bone shifting against bone. Murdock snaps upright from where he’s been slumped over, whimpering. He screams so loud and so hard that it curdles Clint’s blood, reverberates in the marrow of his bones. 

Murdock screams again when Clint puts his hand on his shoulder to placate him. He opens his eyes, except there are no eyes to open, just bleeding and raw and oh, so very empty sockets.

Clint scrambles back and retches.

Jesus. Jesus. What the fuck, why the fuck would anyone do this? What did Murdock do to deserve this?

Not the time to freak out. Clint’s seen worse. He gets back to work on the chain, speaking softly, telling Murdock that it’s going to be okay, he’s here to help. The thing finally comes away from where it’s pinned Murdock to the post. The poor guy has fallen back unconscious, thank fuck.

Clint’s hindbrain decides that a barricade is the way to go in terms of next steps, so he finds himself pulling the loud fucking barn door closed as fast as the track that it’s on will allow it to go. He uses a grappling arrow to secure it and hauls ass back to Murdock’s slumped form. He starts sawing through the binds on his legs.

All fucking hell breaks loose outside.

Gunshots are coming from the direction of the still-lit trees. The earth shakes. Sounds like some sort of semi- or fully automatic. Clint watches the flashes that come through the windows and light up the space overhead. Another gun joins the fight, and someone screams. The steel cable connected to Clint’s grappling arrow falls gracelessly to the ground, severed.

Someone alights on the westernmost window. Clint gets through the final bit of binding and catches Murdock when he leans too far to one side. He lays him out flat on his back, careful not to put pressure on his ribcage or look too closely at his face.

A shadow moves in the corner of Clint’s vision. He nocks an arrow, breathes in, turns to aim--

Spider-Man is three inches from the end of his fucking bow. Clint redirects a fraction of a second before his fingers loose the arrow. It ends up lodged in the wall to his right. The gunfight rages outside.

“Damn it, kid, some warning next time!”

Spidey’s upside-down suit eyes bore into his soul. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh-uh. You first.”

“Lookin’ for him,” Spidey replies, flipping upright all easy and languid, pointing at Murdock’s abused face.

“You know Murdock?”

Spidey gives him a look. If Clint could see his eyes, he’d guess it’s made up of teenage frustration and bemusement. “Uh--”

Murdock coughs and it wracks his whole body. Spidey drops off the end of the conversation and rushes to his side. Clint holds out a warning hand and says, “Look, kid, there’s, uh, his--”

“Oh my god.” Spidey drops his gloved hand from where it’s touching Murdock’s face. “Oh, no, oh my god.”

And just like that, Clint’s alone again. The kid leaves a breeze of muggy air and web fluid in his wake. 

Clint wishes he’d brought his duffle. His first-aid kit’s in there. For now, he fumbles for his phone and cuts away the destroyed shirt and boxing robe from Murdock's chest and arms. His naked chest is covered in angry bruising, deep cuts, and ugly abrasions in the shape of chains. It’s obvious that there are at least a few broken or shattered bones in there. He’s got some crazy-looking old scars, too. They stand out white against the red of the new wounds.

The gunfire picks up. Something explodes out front. Probably the truck. Clint can imagine exactly three people who would accompany Spider-Man with access to so much firepower. Sure as hell ain’t Barnes; he got shipped off to South America for a mission a couple days ago. That leaves the Punisher or Deadpool.

Clint really fucking hopes it’s the Punisher.

The phone picks up and Clint haggles with the guy on the emergency services line for a minute before realizing he doesn’t have an address. Well, shit. He gives the guy the road name, zip code, a description of the property, and figures they can trace the call if they need to. It’s time for a new burner anyway.

The door to the barn gets blown off its track and thrown a good fifteen feet. Clint shields Murdock’s body from the debris it kicks up. 

Deadpool jaunts in amongst the dust. He’s got about three different rifles strapped to him. Hundreds of bullets worth of magazines. In his arms is some terrifying, monstrous combination of an old-timey bazooka and a grenade launcher. Good stuff. Clint backs the hell up and gets out of the way.

Spidey swings down in front of Deadpool and stops the guy in his tracks. Clint can’t hear them with all the ambient noise, but Deadpool tries to get past the kid and Spidey digs his hands into those giant shoulders, which have to be half a head taller than him. He braces his feet when Deadpool pushes against him. One of his legs is shaking. They bicker for a moment before Clint notices Deadpool drop the tension in his shoulders. He hears the frustrated plea, sees Spidey nod his head. Spidey’s arms drop to his sides. Clint watches Deadpool sweep that shaky leg right out from under the poor sucker.

Deadpool makes it to Murdock before Spidey can recover. Clint approaches, cautious. Spidey comes up to stand beside him. He hiccups a sob under the mask.

Is Spidey crying? Is Peter crying over Clint’s lawyer? How does he even know him?

Deadpool’s figured out what all the fuss is about. One of his hands sits on Murdock’s bloodied cheeks. It comes away and leaves a smear. He checks Murdock’s breathing and pulse. He braces his hands on his kneeling thighs, lowers his head, and holds his breath for about half a minute. 

He stands, a wall. Peter pleads, “Wade, you can’t kill him, please.”

Deadpool looks at Clint with white suit eyes made of impenetrable marble. “Keep the kid in here for a minute.”

Hold up, wait a second. “The guy who did this is my mark, man. If he’s still alive, I’m taking him in.”

“There’ll be no need for that. Keep the kid here. Call emergency services if you haven’t already.” Wade pushes past Clint’s crossed arms and strides towards the blown up entryway.

Ain’t no point in chasing after all those guns. That’s asking for a bullet to the face.

Peter fucking crumples on top of Murdock.

It hurts so bad to drag him off, but he’s crushing the guy’s already-broken ribs.

It takes three minutes, fifty-three seconds, and one gunshot that rings too long in Clint’s aids for Deadpool to return.

The ringing turns into sirens turns into blue and red lights that stop moving after they’ve encircled the building. Deadpool tells Clint around arms full of distraught Spidey to fuck off if he doesn’t want to get arrested. 

No arguments here, Mr. Murder, sir. Clint beats a hasty retreat. 

Murdock’s shrieks of agony, hundreds of bullets firing, Peter’s hoarse cries. They all catch in his aids and play on a loop in his head while he sneaks around cop cars and ambulances and fire trucks to his bag. Clint takes them out. They spend the trip home in the bottom of the duffle. The silence isn’t much of an improvement.

The kid calls him ten hours after he gets back into the city. He sounds like amplified exhaustion and tear-strained vocal cords. He tells Clint that Murdock’s in the ICU at one of the Mount Sinais. He says that Clint can come visit once Murdock is stable enough to be transferred. 

No, that’s probably not the best idea. He’ll send some consolation flowers to Nelson instead. It’ll be enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Crude humor a la Clint Barton, gunshots, explosions, graphic depictions of trauma and violence inflicted in previous chapters, angst and more angst.


	4. all fizzled out

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies about the late update, I've been working on a couple of other projects in the past weeks and Real Life is being incredibly time-consuming. Content warnings in the end notes as always.

Matt wakes up.

Everything is wrong. It’s all wrong. Last he remembers is--

He can’t see.

He can’t see. It’s so, so wrong, he could see last time, he can’t see anything anymore. It’s painful. Concentrated in throbbing wrongness occupying the front of his skull. He can’t remember what’s no longer there, what feels so foreign and why. Can’t hear or feel or smell or see or taste or see or see or 

Matt falls away.

The second time around is worse. 

At first, it’s fizzing and carbonated fluorescents shrieking somewhere above his head. It’s the rancid cries of dying people above and below and all around, framed by nauseous fragmented mosaics of medicated sedated infected blood. 

Then it’s static in his sinuses, heavy numb void somethings bookending the upper bridge of his nose. The burning acid smell of urine-soiled laundry several walls away irritates his nostrils.

Then, last, he feels the hand resting on his forearm and everything else comes flooding in.

The scrape of the carving fork. Chest caved in. Chains melting indiscriminate and callous into weeping, desperate flesh.

He has to get out of here. Has to get away from the hammer and fists, from steel-toed wrath-harbinger boots, Abe’s got him by the arm can’t let him break the arm needs to twist tries to scream--

The hand on his arm disappears when he succeeds. There’s a voice near him--not Abe: familiar, quiet, belongs at home, belongs near him--repeating something. Matt listens hard; it’s saying, “--ey, shh, hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe, I’m here. Matt, you’re safe. It’s okay, it’s me. It’s Wade...”

It’s Wade.

He’s not--not--

He’s safe. He’s not chained to a cold, merciless pillar. He’s lying down on something soft and yielding. A bed.

The tension leaves his body. He tries talking, pushes out, “Where’m I?” His voice is lacerated, shredded, and it’s hard to push the sluggish air through the weight of a dull aching pressure in his chest and the fog of painkillers. His ribs warn him not to try to speak again and his lungs struggle to exchange enough oxygen.

Wade stops his placations. “Hospital. Found you about fifty miles upstate. Peter and I, we were, uh, almost too late. Went into surgery as soon as you got here...”

Matt loses track of Wade’s explanation. He reaches out a hand in the direction of the voice and it’s caught between two rough palms. A scarred thumb paints wide, sweeping brush strokes between the medical tape and band-aid obstacles on the back of his left hand. 

Wade’s still talking. Matt drifts for a while, floats on the ups and downs of his cadence.

Safe voice, Wade.

When he musters the energy to return to the present, Wade is asleep in the chair. His hand is still loosely intertwined with Matt’s on the bed.

The world has begun to return to him. He can feel the bustling, writhing veins of the hospital coming to life under the blanket of drugs that dulls the hard-edged complaints from his ribs. From his throat and his face. 

He spends some time--not sure how much, his brain doesn’t want to be cooperative about moving linearly--cataloging what he can tell of the trauma on his body. Starts at the tips of his toes and traces bruising, breaks, cuts, sprains on an upward path.

It’s an ugly trip.

His body is the skeleton of a sunken shipwreck half-buried on the floor of a dispassionate ocean. Sails have long torn to shreds, wooden hulls are logged with frigid briny water, compelled by salty years to drift up and away. Ribs don’t sound like old ships anymore--rather pulverized planks which shiver when he inhales like they’re made of breakable crumbly sand.

A cannula tickles his nostrils. The air that it delivers tastes canned and sits coppery in the back of his throat.

When he gets to his eyes, he already knows. The feel of gauze and bandages covering his face like a blindfold surfaces the deep-buried memory of his earliest experience at a hospital: after the accident. He’d spent weeks stifled under the pressure of similar bandages; they’d served as constant reminders of his newfound blindness and, by the time he’d been allowed to take them off, they were unbearably itchy.

Behind those bandages, a pain that should be unfathomably sharp needles gently at him. 

There was empty space there. 

After Abe stabbed his eyes out.

There was blood and nothing else.

Now the space is filled by foreign objects. Synthetic orbs of a similar mass to their predecessors. 

Prosthetics?

Matt tries contracting his muscles to feign looking left, but he can feel the tissue protesting even through all the painkillers fucking up his sensory processing. He stops.

His body hurts. He’s tired. Listens to Wade’s breathing until he falls asleep.

When he wakes up, the manic hum of adolescence is sitting next to his right foot and tapping at a touchscreen. 

Mmm. “Peter.”

Lots of energy focuses on him at once. Peter buzzes as loud as the fluorescents for a second. He half-yells, “You’re up! Wait, lemme get Wade, justasec--” and he’s off like a shot.

Matt tries to follow his bouncing footsteps down the hall, but he loses track of him around a corner and returns his focus to his immediate surroundings.

His head is a bit clearer this time, and he estimates from the drip of the IV next to him and the content of the bag to which it’s attached that they’ve downed his painkillers a bit. 

Good thing, that. Gives him something harsh and volatile against which he can ground himself. Makes it less overwhelming to sort through the massive influx of sensory input.

God, he hates hospitals. There’s too much birthing and living and dying happening in a massively concentrated space. He can’t effectively narrow his focus because of the painkillers. 

Hospitals make him feel helpless. His broken body makes him feel helpless. Feeling helpless is an angry, incessant itch in the pit of his stomach. His anxious fingers pick at the seam of the sheet covering his legs.

He finds the footsteps again. They’re headed in his direction, accompanied by a pair of longer-strided, more purposeful ones. 

Both pairs of shoes pause at the nurses’ station. Peter bounces on the balls of his feet. Even with the layers of drugs and the walls in the way, Matt can feel that anxiety rolling in like a tide.

He sets to work on trying to sit up. It’s an excruciatingly involved process. His torso fights him, his arms fight him, his lungs seize and invert and implode and collapse--he stops trying to move and focuses all of his energy on breathing.

In.

Out.

In--

In--

Goddamnit, In. The air outside of his body sits stagnant and mulish and refuses to respond when he inhales. The insistent metallic oxygen from the nasal cannula pools in his nose and taunts him, just out of reach.

He ticks his jaw and tries not to panic.

Again: In.

It works. His shoulders lose tension.

A weight appears on the edge of the mattress suddenly and from out of nowhere. Matt flinches away, surprised.

It’s Wade. He says, “Hey, Red. S’me. Peter told me you were awake. Got your nurse here too.” His hand finds Matt’s and his index finger asks permission to hold it. Matt lets go of the sheet to allow Wade’s fingers to intertwine with his.

Peter’s tucked up against the wall opposite the bed. There’s another person at the foot of the bed. Smells like exasperated exhaustion and sounds like a pencil scribbling notes on a metal clipboard--nurse.

Matt makes sure his breath is caught before he says, “Hey. G’morning.”

Nurse pipes up from behind the clipboard. “It’s rapidly approaching eleven at night, but a good morning to you, too. I’m Shay with a ‘y’, and my shift’s about over, so I’d super-duper appreciate it if nothing dramatic happened in the next hour or so.”

Matt pulls the aching muscles in his cheeks into a wan smile and nods. Nurse--Shay--shuffles a couple of things around at the foot of the bed, then comes to check on the mess of beeping monitors and bags of drugs above Matt’s head.

Satisfied, they ask Matt way too many yes or no questions about his level of pain, symptoms, whether or not he remembers what happened. He shakes and nods his head until the world spins in circles. 

Peter scoots along the wall to which he’s attached and nearly runs into a trash receptacle. 

Last thing Shay does before they leave the room is press a plastic remote into Matt’s hand. They guide his thumb to the largest button and tell him that it’s for if he needs anything.

And then Nurse Shay is out of the room; heavy door closes behind them, whiff of caffeine withdrawal and mint gum disperses in their wake, Peter comes off the wall to occupy the newly available space.

Matt’s tired. Every inch of him--down to the marrow of his bones. He turns his head to face Wade.

Wade asks, “You goin’ back to sleep?”

Yeah. Sleep. Needs some fucking rest. Needs to get the fuzzy, drugged feeling out of his veins.

He quits trying to process what’s happening outside of himself. He squeezes the hand trapped in his, and lets himself sink into unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: discussion of and description of injuries/violence inflicted in previous chapters, mentions of painkillers/sedation.


	5. old stones, gunpowder, feu d'artifice eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> !!! It's my birthday, have an early update bc I can't keep an upload schedule to save my life. Content warnings in the end notes, stay safe!

Three months, it’s been.

Three months and eleven days since Wade let his guard down. Since he let Matt slip through his fingers. 

Since he put a bullet through the skull of the piece of shit who nearly took Matt away.

Three months of innumerable guilt-ridden apologies. Three months of Matt stoically ignoring the massive, ineluctable elephant in the room.

The first of those months was spent in hospitals and rehab institutes. After the initial shock wore off, Matt had been chomping at the bit to get out. To get back to normal. To remove himself from the legions of the sick and the damned that only he could sense around him. For those first couple of weeks, Wade had been forced to keep a constant vigil on whatever room Matt was being housed in lest he make a break for a window or an emergency exit and kill himself in the process.

And then the physical therapy kept getting stalled out because Matt would push himself so far past his limits that he’d end up breaking or straining or tripping over himself.

Fuckin’ pile of med bills higher than Matt’s remaining law school debt. Fuckin’ healthcare system, fuckin’ Red’s inability to deal with his shit, fuckin’ rent on the apartment’s getting harder to pay every month. Wade’s been unable to travel for jobs, and there are only so many hits to be ordered in New York City in a given day. Weasel’s taken to assigning him a “gold card ceiling” so that Wade doesn’t run the rest of the Hell House’s clientele off.

Two months of Matt back at home and pissed at all the world and sunk into a depression deeper than the Mariana Trench. Two months of night terrors and bandage changing and braces hitting Wade in the face at three in the morning. Of Red waking up screaming, sweaty, flinching when Wade tries to touch him. Of shrugging off efforts to console or comfort him in any way.

No, ain’t no comfort allowed to rear its ugly head in the House Of Murdock. Not even when Matt’s caught crying silent, face-streaking, rib-wracking tears in an empty room at the first social event that Wade manages to drag him out to. Or when his nightmares start to bleed into his waking hours. Or when Wade touches his shoulder in a light warning to scoot past him in the hallway and he flinches so hard that he cracks his elbow against a picture frame.

It’s all stoicism and hard lines etched into a face that’s braced, desperate and anxious, against the intrusion of potential displays of vulnerability. As if the mere thought of accepting any kind of help might immediately and irrevocably emasculate him.

Wade’s sick of watching Matt store his trauma inside the opaque walls of a bottle, or nestled in between the orange plastic of pill containers on the bathroom counter. 

Talking about feelings may not be Wade’s strong suit, but he knows when to ask for help; he accepts that there are limits to that which one person can bear at once. He’s always understood that, been able to pass his weight off and take some from others as necessary.

Matt’s intuitive, but he’s not open anymore. He’s stopped sharing his load. Whatever unwarranted guilt he’s placing on himself is gonna crush him flatter than that collapsed office building did.

He’s been back at work for a month and a half, but Foggy calls Wade every other goddamn day with some horror story about a panic attack before court or a particularly cruel client making the wrong remark about the fresh scars that peek out around the rims of his glasses and nearly getting pummeled. 

The eyes themselves aren’t much of a lifestyle adjustment; Matt’s other senses appear to be largely unaffected by their loss. Most of his trauma seems to be in how he lost them. 

Which, yeah. That tracks. Thinking about it makes Wade’s trigger finger itchy. Makes his vision go veiny and red at the edges.

Matt had him pick out the color of the irises for the new eyes. The removable fake ones that the weird eyeball engineer-doctors created to put over the spherical implants after they’d healed. 

Like massive, creepy contacts, those things are. But different. ‘Cause it’s the whole eye. And Matt doesn’t have to take the damn things out every night before bed.

Before Wade got to hemming and hawing over what color to pick, Matt had informed him that everything was fair game but red, “‘Cause red’s the Devil’s color.” Whole spectrum of perceptible colors to choose from and the only thing off-limits was red.

Wade went with the same shade of brown as the originals.

Peter saw them for the first time and then turned to look up at Wade with a cocked eyebrow and a jutted hip. Called him, “Conservative and unadventurous.”

Matt thought that Peter was exceptionally funny. Said he would have gone with Irish blue like his daddy’s for shits and giggles, but that he appreciated Wade’s choice. 

Not like Matt’ll ever have to look at ‘em, anyway.

Doesn’t matter one way or the other; Red never takes the damn glasses off anymore. Practically sleeps with them on.

Wade doesn’t push that point. Not his battle to fight.

Two weeks back in the suit and Matt seems to be holding his own okay. No major incidents yet. No mental breakdowns, no massive blood loss from stabbings, slashings, bullet wounds. Not even so much as a bad bruise.

He’s being very cautious. Word’s starting to spread that Daredevil’s back on the scene; that he’s going soft.

Matter of time before Wade’s back breaks from the weight of the baggage.

Matt’s digging them a grave so deep that Wade can’t see the sky anymore. Hasn’t been able to for weeks.

The grave collapses during a sparring session with Spidey right before they’re supposed to set out for a job. First big job between the three of them since Matt’s been back.

Matt’s on the offensive, trying to break through Peter’s weaker left defenses. Wade’s going through his arsenal a few yards away. Distracted by his mental checklist: safeties on, bullets counted, blades sharp, holsters and sheaths secure. He glances up in time to watch Peter’s right knee make harsh contact (perfect form, full force of his momentum, leverage expertly utilized) with Matt’s sternum. 

Matt goes down. The eyes of Peter’s mask contort into something mortified and guilty.

And then Matt’s back on his feet faster than humanly possible and lashing out at Peter with every combined ounce of his strength and fighting experience. Aiming to hurt, maim, cause irreparable damage. Peter scrambles back, hackles up and trying his best to dodge the onslaught. Matt sweeps a leg out from under him (left side again, kid’s gotta get better about that or it’ll kill him), and he barely manages to catch himself as he falls. He’s on his back. Pleading, begging for Red to stop.

Red kneels, straddling Spidey’s waist. He pulls an arm back, aims for the jaw. Peter raises his forearms on instinct.

Wade’s at Matt’s back in an instant. He grabs him bodily by the hips, avoiding spaces higher up. Where he knows the layered ridges and valleys of scarred chain imprints sit red and furious over planes of freshly-healed ribs. Pulls him harshly away from Peter.

Red fucking loses it. He screams goddamn bloody murder. Headbutts Wade’s nose hard enough to break it. Crushes fingers, claws forearms and draws blood, kicks backwards and middles Wade’s crotch.

Wade grapples him down and pins him to the ground face-down, shoulder twisted in a cruel maneuver in the hope that the pain will force him to calm down. 

Red’s voice gives out for a second. When he regains it, he’s babbling, “Please, please, please, ‘m sorry Abe, I remember you, stoppitplease can’t breathe can’tsee please pleasepleaseplea--”

Peter taps on Wade’s shoulder and he releases the arm from his grip. Matt keeps fighting for a second. Slowly, he quiets. Wade sits back to give him room. He flips over and pants harsh, adrenaline-framed breaths into the implacable night sky. Reaches up and tears his mask off, scrubs at the scars on his closed eyelids.

Wade gets up.

Peter’s shaking in his boots, but his arms are crossed in a hard, self-righteous way that makes Wade want to get the fuck out of dodge.

Peter breaks the silence. “Double-D, what the fuck was that?”

Matt sits up. Wade bites back the urge to snarl at him. He shakes his head. “It--I thought… when you hit me, I was back in that barn. And he was--Abe--he was killing me. Over and over again. I couldn’t--I didn’t--I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, God, I didn’t know…”

He trails off. His arms have found their way up and over his bent knees and his head hangs like it’s a weight his neck can’t stand to bear a second longer. The set of Peter’s shoulders softens, but he keeps his arms crossed over his chest. Protective. On edge.

“Didn’t know you knew the guy’s name,” Peter says.

Harsh laughter. Like the bark of a tree being pulled from its wooden home. Fibrous, reedy, abrasive. “He made sure I knew who he was.”

First time Wade’s hearing anything about an Abe. He rubs at a prominent scar through the suit fabric covering his elbow and asks, “So? Who was he?”

And just like that, the floodgates slam closed. Red’s face hardens to granite and he straightens his spine, irons out all the curves in his posture. He stands, pulls his mask onto his head and over his eyes. “We’re behind schedule.”

Peter uncrosses his arms to hold his palms out in a stopping gesture. He says, “Hold on. We’re not doin’ anything tonight. Not after you just tried to kill me over a knee to the chest.”

“But--”

“Kid’s right. We’re done tonight,” Wade interjects.

Matt grimaces. “We’re going to miss a huge opportunity to bag--”

“What we’re gonna miss isn’t worth anything if you’re in a dangerous headspace. You’re not ready.”

Red’s fists curl. Nostrils flair and the grimace widens into a bare-toothed snarl. 

Wade watches and stands placid. He invites the growing potential for violence into his home.

Peter sees the teeth and the fists and steps away in an uncharacteristically timid display of surrender. Matt twitches his head away from Wade to focus on Peter. His brows knit under the mask and he quits posturing, confused. Ashamed.

Peter says, “I can’t work with you if I don’t have complete faith that you have my back, man. That trust isn’t there right now.”

He turns away from the conversation and starts in the direction of Queens. Throws over his shoulder, “You need to work on your shit before it eats you alive.”

He skips into a jog and throws out a line of web that carries him far away.

Matt makes a face at the last comment and turns to Wade.

Ugh, so much seriousness tonight. Wade shakes the weight out of his arms and says, “Don’t look at me, man. Spidey’s right. You gotta figure out how to live in your new normal. No goin’ back to where we were until you learn to process that.”

“The fuck is my new normal?”

Wade shrugs. “Dunno. Not for me to answer. C’mon, I’m gettin’ stiff. Race you back to Manhattan.”

That perks Red right up. His head swivels immediately in the direction of the Kitchen and he’s off and into the night like a greyhound chasing a rabbit.

Wade takes a moment of blessed quiet to rein himself in. Then he pulls out his phone to make use of his newly perfected Uber-ordering skills and makes easy peace with the fact that he’s going to lose.

“Where the fuck are we going?”

“Next time you ask that I’m gonna throttle you with one of your fancy court ties, Red. Ruining the ‘surprise’ aspect of ‘surprise road trip’.”

Wade’s in the driver’s seat of a rented Enterprise sedan, which smells like the inside of a used vape cartridge. Matt sits beside him, seat-belted into the shotgun side with his sweatpants tucked into long socks and gangly legs spread out all over the dash. 

His head rests boredly against the armrest-console combination, which twists his back into a position that has Wade’s spine tweaking in sympathy. One hand flips through the same ten radio stations; the other antagonizes Wade’s right arm where it’s slung gently over his trapezius and against his collarbone. 

He cracks Wade’s knuckles for him and says, “Actually, that might be kind of hot.”

Wade smacks at him and narrowly avoids swerving out of his lane on the highway. “Anyone ever wash your filthy fuckin’ mouth out with a bar of soap? Jesus.”

Matt hums and prods at a hangnail on Wade’s thumb. “Don’ think so. One of the kids at Saint Agnes bet me twenty bucks that I wouldn’t take a double shot of bleach once.”

“What the fuck.”

“Wasn’t so bad; I lived.”

Wade curls his lip. “Why would you agree to do that? How old were you?”

“Probably eleven or twelve. Twenty bucks is twenty bucks at any age, man,” Matt replies, matter-of-fact.

Dude.

“Yeah.”

The gas meter’s less than a gallon from empty, so Wade tracks down an exit with a gas station in the next couple of miles and tells Matt that this is the last chance for a stretch or bathroom break.

Soon as the car rolls to a stop next to the pump, Matt bursts free and beelines for the nearest patch of snow-covered, dead grass like a fucking dog. 

Wade turns to tangle with the card reader and get the hose pumping gas, and by the time he glances back over, Matt’s flat on his back and rolling around in the snow-slush and dirt.

Like a fucking dog.

Wade yells, “What the hell are you doing?! Gonna freeze your balls off!!” across the tops of several cars and over the sound of an eighteen-wheeler pulling in. The woman at the pump next to him raises an eyebrow.

Matt sits up, jacket soaked through and stained to hell and back, glasses knocked half off his face. He waves at the hood of the car.

Wade stomps back to the hose to check on the pump and grumbles, “Can’t catch a fuckin’ break,” under his breath.

That earns him an indignant cry from across the parking lot.

Matt falls asleep for the duration of the last leg of the trip, curled up underneath a spare sweatshirt and Wade’s heavyweight winter coat from Canada. The heat’s cranked up, but the dryness of the frigid air outside still manages to squirm through the cracks and into the car.

They pass the sign that welcomes them into New Hampshire as the watery mid-winter sun sinks beneath the silhouetted trees.

Matt snores ever so lightly.

Wade cranks up the classic rock station that’s been ricochetting around in the tinny speakers since Matt gave up on finding anything else.

Roger Daltrey’s resentful voice and the angry, buzzing guitars fill every gap in the car.

Daltrey screams. Wade opens his mouth in silent imitation.

A light shiver runs down the length of his back and pools in his boots.

It’s always some kind of cold, this far north. All year long.

But they’re not crossing the border, and Wade’s ancestral home remains fucking dormant. 

Eyes on the road. Doin’ this for Matt.

Because of Matt. However you want to slice it. 

They pull into the cramped parking lot a couple of hours later.

Matt stirs and yawns, arching his back like a cat emerging from a luxurious nap.

The analogy’s ruined when each of Matt’s vertebrae snap, crackle, and pop up his spine and into his neck in quick succession.

Wade waits for him to finish before he says, “‘Kay. So.”

Matt tilts his head in suspicion. “This is a church, no?”

“Yessir.”

“You brought me to the middle of nowhere in New Hampshire for a church?”

“Think bigger! It’s all about atmosphere, Red.”

Matt shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t understand.”

Wade hefts the car door open and leans into the chilly air. “You will. C’mon, let’s get out of this stuffy ass car.”

Matt scoffs and turns to open the door.

The church is ancient and tiny. It’s built with the great neo-gothic cathedrals of western Europe in mind, but its construction falls vastly short of achieving such a look. Old stones and wooden beams have been painted over several times, so that chipped sections reveal the colors of earlier coats. Approaching the door feels like walking directly into the mouth of some terrible and ancient beast.

Matt runs his hand along a stone wall as they wind around banks of old snow. “Why here?” he asks.

“Needed some place holy. This church has been abandoned for a few years. Stumbled across it on the run from a job.”

Wade nudges the door open and they cross the threshold. The wind’s bite immediately loses its edge, but the cold remains pervasive. Matt’s hand feels frostbitten and blue-tinged nestled in the crook of his elbow. 

Wade continues, “I died here. Over on the other side of those knocked-over pews, the asshat that had been hunting me down caught up and shot me clean through the head a few times and it killed me.”

Matt’s grip on his elbow turns vice-like and spitefully green.

“It was winter, like it is now, so when I woke up it was snowing. And I was hurting really bad, so I took a seat on a pew and prayed until it stopped.

“And when I walked--more stumbled, I guess--out the door, it felt like I was leaving a God I’d never met. Felt like I was walking away from a place that was good and right and just righteous enough to house me. I think, maybe, this church is the closest I ever got to crossing paths with religion.”

With penance. Or forgiveness.

Wade hopes that Matt can find forgiveness.

Matt leans away from Wade. He removes himself from Wade’s side and ambles down the length of the aisle.

He runs his fingers across the top of the lonely podium, kicking up dust that’s sat undisturbed for years. 

He travels to the rear wall to disquiet the looming altar’s peace.

He presses his palms upon the long-forgotten, yellowed tablecloth. Bows his head.

Wade drifts out of the mouth of the great beast to wait alongside the snow sludge carpeting the ashen, muddy ground.

Matt emerges a while later. He takes a seat next to Wade on the battered stone wall and puffs humid clouds of hot breath into the cold air.

He tells the puffs, “I’m ready to absolve myself of some of this guilt.”

Wade squints. “Why not all of it?”

“Because some of it’s mine to keep.”

Fair enough. “Can I see your glasses for a second?” Wade asks.

Matt hands them over. Wade looks at the lenses. He wipes at the dust that they’ve gathered from inside the church and the specks of melted snow and the halfway-there fingerprints littering the bits around the frames.

He double checks his reflection before passing them back.

Matt says, “I think I need something other than the Church to help me with this.”

“Mmmm.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

Wade laughs. “When’s the last time you went to a session of good, old-fashioned therapy?”

Matt frowns with his eyebrows and with the muscles in his jaw. “I hate it when you’re right.”

Yeah, sometimes Wade hates it too.

“Can we go home now? My ass is gonna freeze to this wall.”

Wade risks a last glance at the church as he replies, “That would be mighty unfortunate for our sex life.”

Matt hums in agreement and they rise in unison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: eye-related talk, discussion of physical trauma inflicted in previous chapters and its consequences, discussion of religion and god/God, Wade-related gore.


	6. aim that roman candle up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world sucks, Peter has decided.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> second to last one! everything's starting to wrap up. warnings in the end notes, stay safe lovelies.

The world sucks, Peter has decided. 

The world is a place which is full to the brim with unwarranted anger and old, resentful deities and so much fucking violence. And Peter is complicit in every bit of it and he thought he’d made peace with that a while ago. 

He was wrong. 

He was so wrong. He was deluding himself that he was worthy of innocence or forgiveness. There is no amount of reasoning or justification in the world that could ever exonerate him from all of the ethically--no. That’s not the right word. _Morally_. Personally, individually, independently--abhorrent crimes he’s committed, been party to, participated in as an active body. 

The whole of recorded human interaction was written on a foundation of universal rules which created and then shaped the ways in which power has distributed itself for centuries. The structure of this distribution nurtures and facilitates the simultaneous development of selfish and self-loathing traits in its participants, who drive themselves insane trying to reconcile the two all their lives.

No one escapes such contradiction. No one gets an out. No one gets a free pass from the twisted, unwinnable, high-stakes gamble of ethics with bets hedged on personal security.

Everyone’s a participant when existence operates on a game of spite-fueled russian roulette.

All this to say that Peter’s done. He’s done being optimistic. He’s done throwing himself at people who are trying to hurt other people in a bid for spite or power or revenge or anything else. He’s done being lauded by half the world for acting as society’s moral compass while the other half lays Spider-Man’s character bare and corrupted in the gutter beside the shattered bodies of beer bottles and fermenting piss. 

He resents the superheroes he knows for their ignorance and he hates the vigilantes for their disregard towards fair justice.

He’s mad at all those around him for the collection of textured, pockmarked, ridged scars on his skin. He’s mad at the bodies he’s inadvertently sent to the grave for dying without his permission. He’s mad at himself for believing that justice existed in a universe so hellbent on fucking killing everything good or well or generous or positive inside of it. For fooling himself into thinking that hope would ever have the power to effect change.

No matter what he does to prevent it, the hope people seem to find in Spider-Man is always-- _always_ , every time, nothing ever changes, people never change, they’re terribly and evilly predictable--inevitably and violently quashed by a more fervent desire for personal gain. 

Peter’s tired of fighting a battle he’s always known is going to end with him in a box made of pine, given back to the dirt from which he emerged.

He doesn’t want to inspire any kind of hope if it’s only going to be manipulated and twisted into an unrecognizable, unjustified anger and leveraged against him at some point. He doesn’t want to end up like Matt, whose past came reckoning for him in the shape of a carving fork.

He doesn’t want to end up like Wade, who clings desperately to the shredded white flag he’s been waving in the face of an apathetic god for years.

He doesn’t want to turn out like Stark or Mr. Rogers, or--god forbid--either of the Hawkeyes. 

He doesn’t want to hurt the world anymore. He doesn’t.

Aunt May holds him while he shakes and tries and fails to breathe on a hardwood floor at one in the morning.

Her stolid shoulders let him know that it’s okay; he doesn’t owe anyone anything. He can get out while there’s still time, while he’s still young. He can forgive himself and close this chapter of his life. Hang up the mask, never look back.

Her voice cracks and stutters as it tells him the opposite. That which he already knows.

Great power. Great responsibility, shirked.

No fair way around it.

Peter shrugs his shoulders around a hiccup, but he’s Atlas and so the universe topples.

Peter doesn’t take time off. He really doesn’t. He just distances himself for a little while. 

He calls in sick to his internship with Stark for a couple of weeks and lies to Ms. Page’s face about unavailability due to extracurriculars. He lets his burner run out of juice and buries it in the bottom of the junk drawer in his dresser. 

Wade’s calls to his cell go ignored.

Matt doesn’t call him. For this, he’s grateful. Small blessings, as they were. 

There are two texts a few nights after the incident on the rooftop and his subsequent crisis of identity. The first is a couple of paragraphs long. It’s context for why the guy--Abe, his name was--went after Matt. It makes the back of Peter’s throat taste like bile.

The second message is a “sorry” and a “not back on my feet yet” and the punctuation has clearly been mangled by whatever voice-to-text software it was sent with.

Good. Peter’s not ready, either. 

The suit gets a few upgrades. He can’t seem to funnel his nervous energy into anything else, so he breaks out Ben’s old toolbox and tears apart the mask, strips out the boots, disembowels the web-slingers for the millionth time.

May makes a habit of checking on him around midnight to supervise the ritual washing of blackened, greasy hands and the subsequent climbing into bed. Peter usually tries to wait until she’s slunk off to her room for the night before donning the suit and escaping out the window for some test runs on the roof. He can’t bring himself to patrol.

The tabloids start speculating after the tenth day of his absence on the streets.

Wade keeps calling. 

He’s spending his nights in Queens. Peter sees him every so often. Not patrolling, not doing business, not waiting. Just strolling down roads, bopping his head to a tune playing from his bright pink headphones. Loitering in public parks and on the steps of bureaucratic offices, soliciting various outdoor statues and sculptures for whatever wisdom Deadpool could possibly glean from them. He’s letting people know: just ‘cause Spidey dipped don’t mean y’all get to go apeshit in the streets.

Peter catches sight of him through a window one afternoon. He’s out of the suit and approaching the front step to Peter’s building. Peter asks May to turn him away if he knocks, which he does less than five minutes later. Loudly. 

But Wade listens to May when she whispers to him through the cracked door. Peter watches him retreat back the way he came from the same window.

Peter needs a new perspective on this. A voice of reason. A voice which is used to approaching issues of politics and morality with well-proportioned delicacy and nuance. One that knows how to navigate intersectionality with grace. 

This voice is MJ. It is one which is perfectly happy to call Peter out and inform him when he’s being ignorant or when his privilege is clouding his judgment.

May’s delighted when he tells her that MJ’s coming over to help him with assembling a part on the suit. It’s a lie, but a small one. MJ will probably want to prod at the suit regardless of whether or not Peter asks her to.

She shows up at their step, arms laden with pasta salad and a boxed collection of tiny precision screwdrivers. Her hair’s pulled up and into a puffy bun on the top of her head. She’s gotten an undercut in the time since Peter last saw the underside of her hair.

It looks good. Very post-armageddon edgy, with a geometric design shaved into it that compliments the angle of her jawline. She’s pretty, standing there in the doorway. Flyaways backlit by the hall light.

May dotes over her and her tub of cold pasta noodles and a whistling kettle of almost-tea. MJ smiles with the dimples in the corners of her mouth and the apples of her cheeks and makes small and medium talk from a stool at their breakfast bar.

Peter hangs out on the sliver of counter next to the sink and slurps at the hot tea when it’s handed to him.

MJ takes honey in hers. That makes Peter’s heart pound a little extra fast against his ribs.

When the tea is finished and May is out of pithy one liners and fresh topics of discussion, Peter shuttles MJ down the hall to his room and deposits her in his desk chair. There, she tucks her feet up and sets about reorganizing Peter’s disastrous toolbox and its contents, which are sprawled over his decrepit desk.

Peter picks his way around the various scattered pieces of the disassembled suit and settles on his bed to watch her process. 

He purses his lips and thinks about what he’s trying to say. MJ wags a finger at him without looking. “Shut up,” that finger warns, “I’m focusing.” 

He waits.

She spends several minutes removing and then replacing each individual drill bit, bolt, and screw. She even color-codes the little compartment of thumbtacks. When she’s satisfied, she closes the lid, leans back, and turns to address Peter’s puppy dog eyes. “You have troubles,” she remarks, hands steepled across her belly.

Peter’s integrity goes all mushy. He buries his face in his hands, elbows braced against his knees, and replies, muffled, “I have troubles.”

He can feel the eyebrow leveled at the crown of his head. 

“So many troubles.”

“Do tell, dear spider.” MJ’s tone, usually punctuated with acidic vinegar and flared nostrils, is soft like sage and lavender incense.

Peter props his chin on the flat of one palm. He mumbles, “‘M not a spider.”

“What’s on your mind, bitch boy?”

He’s annoyed. She’s not getting it. “I don’t know if I can keep being Spider-Man.”

MJ’s eyebrow returns to its usual spot. “Oh?”

Peter scowls and creaks, “I’m tryin’ to--to get a sense of what I’m doing here. What my goal is, what--what my personal moral code is.”

“Elaborate,” MJ requests, “Please.”

“Um. So. Recently. Double D got hurt really bad. As a result of something he did a few years ago that was really fucking bad, that was not good or fair or just. And it got me thinking about what I’m doing. Why I’m going out at night and forcing my version of righteousness on so many people.”

MJ tilts her head up and squints at him down the bridge of her nose. “You try to help people, right?”

Well. He tries, yeah. “That’s kind of my schtick. Friendly and neighborhood-y and sticky.”

“You help people. Why.”

“Because otherwise they’d hurt, and I have the means to stop that hurt,” he replies immediately. It doesn’t take much thought, which surprises him.

MJ closes her eyes and nods like he’s finally catching on. She says, “The means. The power. Enhancements. Whatever you wanna call it. That’s what makes your situation unique. That’s what drives you to go out there.”

Peter’s brows furrow. “That alone isn’t reason enough to excuse vigilante justice. What I’m doing is still illegal. I’m still beholden to the law.”

“Peter, the law doesn’t always reflect what’s right. It’s often written by corrupt, evil people for selfish reasons.”

Yes.

But that’s not it. 

“There’s--you follow the rules--people follow the rules out of a desire to be good. To make society better.”

“People also break rules to make society better,” MJ volleys in response.

“So is what I’m doing improving things? Am I improving society?”

“I dunno, do you think you’re helping people who are hurting?”

Peter feels heavy. “It’s hard to tell nowadays,” he settles on.

MJ shifts in the desk chair so that she can better lean forward to address him. “You’re not Daredevil or Iron Man or Deadpool or any of those self-centered fucks you spend all that time around. Don’t trick yourself into believing that. Whatever happened to Daredevil, he probably earned that person’s ire by acting selfishly. At your roots, you aren’t like them. You do the work in the suit to stop people’s suffering.”

“But that suffering just transfers over to the ones I put in jail.”

She shrugs. “It’s a negative feedback loop. But the people you send to jail aren’t innocent like the ones you save. Human suffering is inherent; you’ll never be able to eradicate it. Pain and humanity go hand in hand.”

Mmm. Peter sees this and raises, “Then why do I have to break the law to do what’s right?”

MJ cackles, but there’s no mirth in it. “We’ve got to actively work against systems of oppression in order to make forward progress,” she drawls, eyeing the suit pieces on the floor like she’s just made an epiphany.

Peter waves his hand in the direction of the gloves and she pounces. He watches her in silence for a while. 

“I should work on settin’ up a union at SI,” he declares.

“Psh, you’re an unpaid intern there. Interns don’t count for shit. Also, there’s definitely already a union there,” MJ argues.

“Hm. The law firm, then. Bet Ms. Page would help me. She works with the Labor Coalition office a lot.”

MJ pauses in her ripping of seams and glaring at concealed electrical to nod thoughtfully. “Could have Spider-Man do volunteer work for some labor orgs. Start aligning yourself with the workers, plus it’s within the confines of the law.”

Good fuckin’ idea right there. Some food for thought. “I hate how much working with the Avengers has made Spider-Man sympathetic with the bourgeoisie.”

MJ smirks and notes, “Sounds to me like you’re gearin’ up to turn into a full blown Marxist.”

“Girlo, we both know I got indoctrinated into that shit years ago.”

“D’aw. If Barnes heard you say that, he’d be so proud.”

“Well, yeah. It’s his fuckin’ fault and he knows it.”

MJ tosses him a signature eye roll and beams a miniscule screwdriver at his socked foot. “Get working on the boots, I’m almost done with the gloves. You got a sewing machine?”

No. But he knows someone who does.

Wade about tackles him when he shows up unannounced on his and Matt’s doorstep, arms full of a bag containing the suit and a few spools of fancy thread he swiped from Stark’s lab.

Pretty sure Stark watched him the entire time he was walking over to the workbench full of the sewing crap, tucking the thread discreetly into his coat pocket, and then strolling suspiciously away. But he never said nothin’ about it, even when Peter showed up the next time with a clearly tampered-with suit. He’s cool like that sometimes.

Wade yanks Peter into the living room and rushes around, weaving between various linen closets and storage tubs to gather sewing supplies.

It’s late afternoon. Matt’s still at work. Peter ignores the fresh hole punched through the drywall beside the TV and lays his suit out in the pattern he wants to show Wade.

He’s halfway through a stubborn curve on the torso of the suit when Matt taps through the front door. Wade pokes himself through the knuckle of the glove he’s hand-sewing and   
curses.

He gets distracted watching Matt beeline for the fridge and screws up the angle of the seam. Again.

Fifth time. Maybe this bit gets to be saved for Wade to take a look at, ‘cause his fingers can’t seem to get their shit together.

The couch dips next to him. It’s Matt, crunching on salad leftovers. The untied tie slung around his neck is bright pink, but it somehow doesn’t look terrible coupled with the muted collared shirt he’s wearing. Peter takes his foot off the pedal of the machine and Wade stops picking at the glove in his hands. They stare at Matt in silence.

He catches on pretty quick. “What? Whaddid I do?”

Wade shakes his head and shrugs and returns to his fight with the needle. “Nothin’.”

“Want some salad, Pete?”

Dude. What an awkward fucking olive branch. “Sure?”

Matt hops up from the couch and returns to the fridge, careful not to knock the coffee table where it’s been pulled closer to accommodate the sewing machine. Wade and Peter exchange bemused looks.

Wade bites the bullet first. “Dearest?” he calls to the kitchen.

“Hmm?”

“We not gonna talk about it?”

“Well,” Matt responds, back turned to feel around in a cabinet full of dishes, “I figured y’all were pretty focused. Didn’t want to interrupt. You want salad too?”

Wade stares, dumbstruck, at Matt’s back. He shakes himself out of it and nods, narrates it out of habit, and adds, “Yeah, sure, whatever, but we gotta talk about it at some point tonight.”

“‘Kay. Gonna have salad first.”

Oh, he’s so chipper. Peter doesn’t know how to feel about this chipper Matt. He’s kind of terrifying.

They eat their salad and Wade glares vehemently at the knuckle of the glove in his lap while Matt recounts the outcome of an exciting day in court with enthusiastic hand gestures. Peter tries not to look at the bits of shiny red and white scarring that peek out from behind his glasses. It’s been a couple of weeks since he’s seen them and he’d sort of forgotten what they looked like. 

Matt’s filling time, waiting for Peter to bring it up. Giving him room to decide when he’s comfortable. 

Peter sets his empty bowl down next to the sewing machine and says, “I think I’m ready to start working with you guys again, if the fixes on the suit work.”

Matt turns his head to face him. The smile on his face is a little sad. “That’s good to hear, but I’m not sure if I’m quite there yet. I’m still working through a lot--with help. Figuring out how to accept help. But I think it’ll be a while yet before I’m okay to work with other people again.”

Wade nods across from them. “You still owe me a drywall patch from last weekend,” he points out, gesturing behind himself to the TV and the broken wall to which it’s attached.

Peter thinks about how he needs to reply. He thinks about his talk with MJ and how he’s feeling about Spider-Man. “Okay. But I want to be there if you need it. For whatever. And I want you to know that I forgive you, even if you can’t forgive yourself yet,” he says, a little hesitant. “Oh, and I’m ready to come back to the office. I lied to Karen about why I was taking time off,” he adds as an afterthought.

Matt chuckles. “I know; I heard.”

Oh.

Nothing’s sacred when this guy’s around, huh?

Wade pokes himself through the glove again and Matt confiscates the needle for the night.

It takes all of five weeks before Matt declares himself cured of depression and free from symptoms of PTSD. Neither of these assertions are true, but the guy’s got thick fucking walls and Peter’s sure he knows how to conceal trauma with the best of ‘em.

Peter’s looking to Wade for a read on this. He doesn’t seem particularly on edge when they meet up for the first time on a roof not far from Hell’s Kitchen, so Peter drops his guard and lets himself jump back into working on a team. 

He gives enough trust to stop Matt from twitching his head anxiously in his direction.

The Devil leads them into a warehouse on the docks, chest puffed out with the confidence of an English Pointer. They emerge out the other side unscathed and sit on a nearby building to observe as the herd of drug pushers trapped inside is escorted into cop cars with lights on, strobing red and blue.

One officer squints and shines a flashlight at the building they’re hanging their feet from. Wade waves at her. Peter sees the whites of her eyes flash while she pats frantically at her partner’s shoulder. 

Wade hollers an obscenity into the night sky and they skedaddle.

Matt says at one point that he’s got one last thing to do before he can put his shit behind him. He whispers what it is into Peter’s and Wade’s ears and when he’s done, Peter doesn’t laugh, but it’s a close thing. 

Matt makes a call. Of course, Barton doesn’t pick up. Fucking characteristic of him. Matt sighs and says he’ll try from his office phone in the morning.

Peter goes home that night full of nerves that are still a little fried and a moral compass that’s still spinning a little bit. But he’s got his team back. And he’s pumped to see Barton flip his shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: discussion of identity issues/the justice system, anxiety/little bit of panic attacks


	7. up in smoke

Clint’s got a voicemail sitting weighty and expectant in his answering machine.

He’s listened to it a good four times.

The thing’s from his lawyer. Not the bullshit one--not Stark’s lawyer who deals with all the fallout from the Avengers; the real one. For real day-to-day Clint Barton issues, both criminal and civil. The one whose services he pays for out of pocket. The one Nat recommended he enlist after the clusterfuck with the tracksuits and those white vans. Staking out his building all the damn day. 

Murdock.

Matt Murdock wants to buy him fries at a diner right outside of Bed-Stuy.

His lawyer. Wants to buy him fries.

There’s definitely something going on here. Some ulterior motive. Some reason for cornering him inside a public establishment and bribing him with shit food.

But fuck it, fries are fries and Clint’s fridge is horribly emaciated from his recent lapse in motivation to go out and get groceries. Or do anything else, really.

Clint naps instead of calling the guy.

Kate drops by at some later point with a twenty-four pack of plastic water bottles and a pile of microwave dinners which she dumps all over the last available space on his crowded counter. She scrunches up her lips when their eyes meet across the room. Clint makes himself horizontal on the couch, maintaining eye contact as he does so, and says, “Thanks.”

Kate’s eyes scrunch to match her lips. “You’re not gonna touch this stuff, are you,” her scrunchy lips ask without asking.

“I’ll try.”

Kate scoffs. “That means no, Clint, you know it does. Get up.”

Clint shoves himself deeper into the couch. “I’ll do it, Katie. I’ll do it later,” he whines.

She beams one of the bottles with her left hand and it middles his sternum. She growls, “Sit up and drink the water,” with all the ferocity of a predator on the hunt.

Fuck. Who taught her how to be that intimidating? Damn chill goes down his spine and everything.

He sits up.

Kate crosses her arms and glares him down while he drains half the bottle. He raises an eyebrow at her when he pauses to take a breath and she turns with a flip of her hair to load the microwave dinners into his freezer.

Clint goes to lie back down, but she catches him in the act and gives him a look with enough potential energy to level a city.

“Girl, what?”

“Finish the water. No naps.”

He tosses his hands up in defeat.

Kate spends the night, but it’s only because she wants to play with the bow he’s been adjusting for the past week.

She tosses the thing in his face when she gets bored of messing with it and tells him the pressure’s too much on the limbs, that he needs to restring it.

Clint takes offense. He’d spent a few hours fiddling with the tension and he takes pride in how well maintained his bows are.

He gets up and shoots off a couple lazy arrows into the bullseye of the target just to prove her wrong.

When he turns around, the grin on her face is disgustingly smug. “Got your ass off the couch, and all it took was insulting your craftsmanship,” she remarks.

Oh. 

Clint understands now. He’s been had. “You sneaky shit, I was thinkin’ about havin’ a nap, ” he complains.

Kate waves him off and dips low to steal the arrow right out from between his fingers. “Betcha can’t catch me,” she throws over her shoulder as she flits to the fire escape window.

She’s right. He ain’t got the juice to go chasing that force of energy over rooftops tonight. He mourns the loss of the arrow briefly before diving gratefully back into the couch.

Kate slinks back into the apartment a couple hours later. She tosses the arrow at him with much contempt and frustration and stomps to the kitchen to heat up one of the microwave meals.

Clint doesn’t feel like getting up to make one for himself. He returns to his staring at the back of the couch and settles back into where he was before the interruption, teetering on the edge of a midnight nap.

Kate shoves his legs aside when she goes to sit on the couch, plastic container of noodles in hand. He peeks over the slope of his hunched shoulder to watch as she kicks her legs onto the coffee table and turns the TV on. Her face sours at the ad on the screen and she flips the channel to a sit-com riddled with canned laughter. Satisfied, she leans down to rub Lucky’s belly when he offers it.

Clint takes the aids out of his ears and sets them on the coffee table so the dog doesn’t accidentally step on them. Bathed in blissful quiet, he closes his eyes and drifts back to sleep.

Lots of naps transpire over the course of the next week. Lots of not moving very far in a day and then feeling guilty about his null productivity and then doing nothing to rectify it.

Voicemails from his lawyer pile up in his answering machine. His counters collect used cups and beer bottles. A sock monster takes form and then gains sentience at the foot of the couch. Stark sends Nat to bug him when he misses a meeting, but she gets one good look at the state of his apartment and rules it a lost cause.

Cap shoots him a text or two inquiring about a shared mark, but he forgets to answer in a timely manner and then it’s too late to respond without excessive apologizing and awkward excuses. 

It’s all exhausting. Clint naps about it.

He’s heavy when he finally musters the energy to eat a full meal. Gravity pounds in his broken ears and tugs at his tired knees. 

He eats in the kitchen. Standing next to the microwave.

Then he’s already up and cleaning his plate, so why not hand wash the other dishes?

And now his coffee carafe is all nice and clean and, hey, would ya look at that, so are his mugs!

A little coffee never hurt nothin’. 

Oh, how he loves coffee. He does some rearranging while it brews, so now more counter space is usable. He unearths the answering machine. Finally calls Murdock back about that lunch meeting and gets a time sorted out. He replaces the paper face of his target in the living room.

And then his energy’s depleted. But he desperately needs a shave and a shower, so he does that and rewards himself with a nap. Makes it to his bed and everything.

Bed naps are better than couch naps. Clean shaven jaws are better than itchy scraggle.

No more voicemails sitting on his conscience.

A meeting arranged. A Time to Be Somewhere.

The kid’s in there. Sitting with Murdock. Clint sees them chatting through the window.

The Spider-kid. Plainclothed and nonchalant, chatting with his lawyer in a hole-in-the-wall diner.

Peter. Who is, evidently, invested in Murdock both in the suit and outside of it.

Something isn’t adding up.

Whole thing smells trap-ish.

Clint opens the door and Peter notices him approaching over Murdock’s shoulder. He gives a little wave and switches to Murdock’s side of the booth to give Clint room.

He slides in across from the two of them. 

Feels like a gallows. Feels like he’s about to be evaluated, analyzed, measured. Gonna be handed down a couple life sentences, Judge Murdock presiding, Peter Parker Esquire on prosecution. The jury: plates of fries, yet to convene.

A server comes and takes their orders before Clint gets a chance to strike up a conversation. Peter asks for a massive milkshake to accompany the near 2000 calories of fast food he requests. Murdock’s face reads disgusted but unsurprised the entire time he’s ordering.

The server leaves and Clint pulls his head out of his ass for long enough to drag his eyes away from his nervously twitching thumbs on the tabletop. He narrows a venomous, suspicious glare at Peter, who has the social grace to look sheepish, before clearing his throat and addressing Murdock.

And all them fresh scars mingling with his crow’s feet which those shades of his just barely fail to fully conceal.

He and Murdock open their mouths to speak at the same time. Clint beats him to the punch. 

“Thanks for reaching out and setting this up. Didn’t realize you were bringing a young, impressionable person along; I might have made more of an effort to dress professionally.”

Murdock chuckles. It’s a little dark. “Peter works with me at the office. He managed to strong-arm me into letting him come to this. I’m trying to trick myself into believing that he wants to spend more time with me while I run errands, but the reasonable part of me knows he’s here for the food and the food alone,” he explains as he extends a hand across the table for Clint to shake.

Peter gazes between them with all the youthful innocence he can muster plastered across his face. 

Clint shakes. “I seem to have lost a few of the details in phone tag translation; why were you--and Peter, I guess--wanting to meet with me? I’ve been keeping my head pretty low. Tryin’ to keep out of the precincts, your offices,” he says. “No offense,” he thinks to tack on at the last second.

“Well. I got your flowers a couple of months ago. That was very considerate of you.”

D’aw. That’s not a word people usually use to describe his behavior.

Fuzzy feelings awaken in the back of his head. The spy in him immediately recognizes the lawyer schmoozing disguised within the compliment and a chorus of little alarm bells awakens in his subconscious.

“Mmm. Yeah. I’m real sorry about what happened. Guess I felt bad that I didn’t make it in time to--”

Murdock flaps a dismissive hand. “No, that’s not your fault. It’s--” He pauses as if he’s thinking about how to continue.

Peter’s lost all interest in the exchange. He’s watching a patron at the counter across from their table pour syrup on his food. Clint catches him mid-yawn and he sticks his tongue out.

Murdock figures out what he’s trying to say. “I wanted to thank you for finding me. In person.”

Oh. “Don’t mention it, man.”

“No, it’s important. You saved my life and I need you to know how grateful I am for that. How much of a debt I owe you.”

“It’s not like that. You don’t owe me anything.”

“No, I do. I’ve been--”

The server gets to their table and Murdock clams up while plates are distributed and drinks are topped off. The server narrates the location of utensils and condiments and then they’re alone again.

Peter’s looking at the massive burger in front of him like he’s been starved his whole life, but he waits for Murdock to start eating before he digs in.

Weird fuckin’ behavior. Kid’s giving off one hell of a vibe today. 

Then the smell of greasy food hits Clint’s palate and all thoughts of stilted apologies and suspicious mannerisms disappear in the pursuit of consuming all the fries as soon as possible.

The combined power of food and coffee lightens the atmosphere at their table. About halfway through the meal, Peter picks a fight with a loose thread on the sleeve of Murdock’s right arm and damn near rips the jacket in half trying to remove it. 

He gets a swift whack for his efforts. Clint stuffs his mouth with fries to stifle his chortle.

Discussion shifts away from serious topics and into the world of career highlights. Peter weaves a hilarious story about an interaction between a classmate and their chemistry teacher which went up in literal flames. Murdock pulls out a backlog of law school shenanigans. Clint finds himself relaxing into the flow of conversation.

Murdock excuses himself to go to the bathroom after the check’s been picked up and Peter’s scatterbrained vibe disappears in an instant. Those big brown eyes focus their gaze at Clint, rapt and fully engaged. 

Clint shifts in his seat, self conscious. “There food on my face, kid? Or--”

“I need help with a job.”

“Do you need to be staring through my soul while you tell me about it?”

Peter’s eyes dilate briefly and then redirect to a coffee creamer tower he’s been surreptitiously working on. “I pulled an all nighter last night, and Red Bulls only work on me for about an hour, so I thought I could supplement them with coffee and now everything’s happening all at once,” he explains.

Clint’s heartburn moans in sympathy. He says, “Okay. What’s the job?”

Peter leans down to flick a little ball of straw wrappers at the base of the tower of creamers. The structure comes toppling down. “Workin’ with Double D and Deadpool on some recon in Brooklyn. S’for one of DP’s quote-unquote ‘mortal enemies’.”

“Why not ask Jones or Rand?”

“They’re not in the country. We needa extra pair of hands for a bird’s eye vantage. Daredevil’s shit at fast-paced long-range and I’m gonna be busy with another part of the plan.”

Murdock returns from the bathroom and Peter shuts the fuck up. Clint returns the creamers to their basket and makes small talk while Peter scribbles something on a napkin. 

They leave the diner and part ways about a block north. Murdock shakes his hand again and sets off in the direction of the subway station. Peter slips the napkin into his palm and then skips away in Murdock’s shadow.

Clint looks down. Smudged ballpoint ink informs him of a Tuesday night meeting atop a high rise in Brooklyn. 

An asterisk along the base of the napkin implores him to bring rubber bullets and aim to maim, not kill.

Clint wonders, a little morbidly, if Deadpool also has to adhere to that guideline.

He shows up at the meeting site--which takes the form of a dizzyingly tall rooftop that knocks all the wind out of Clint’s lungs in the process of trying to access--a few minutes early. Spidey’s there, laid out on the roof. Stargazing.

He turns his head and gives Clint a little wave when he crests the edge of the roof.

Clint comes up to him and sits hard on his ass to pant and sweat and make nice with his rapidly approaching middle age.

Peter returns to his staring at the stars and quips, “You just get back from runnin’ a marathon?”

Clint continues to heave and shoves a select finger in Spidey’s direction.

Deadpool surfaces on the southern edge of the building. Spidey hops up when he notices and trots over to greet him.

Clint stays exactly where the fuck he is because sitting down is nice and his lungs are tired and Deadpool gives him the heebie-jeebies.

Spidey steals one of the lumpy bags from Deadpool’s shoulder and scurries back to Clint to open it.

Thing’s full of guns. Lots of guns. There’s no way they’re gonna need this many guns; Clint only has so many hands and Spidey won’t touch anything that shoots metal rounds.

Deadpool approaches them. He drops the other bags he’s carrying, sweeps his gaze across Clint’s sorry state and the rest of the roof, and asks, “Where’s the dumbass?”

“He’s sitting right in front of you, nerd,” Peter responds automatically. He doesn’t even look up from his investigation of the bag.

Ouch.

“Not the blonde one, Pete, I have eyes in my skull that can see. Talkin’ about Red.”

“Ooh, what’s got you all riled up? Better hope the other dumbass didn’t hear that.”

Deadpool unzips his mask and takes it off to more effectively glare at Spidey. It’s an icy, dangerous thing. “I sent him ahead of me. Should be here by now. Where’s the dumbass.”

Peter doesn’t miss a beat. He shrugs and says, “Don’ know. Chill the fuck out, probably just got distracted.”

Deadpool--Wade Wilson, that’s his name, Clint’d forgotten--flares his scarred nostrils and yanks his mask back over his head. He zips the neck back up and narrows the white lenses at Clint when he catches him staring. “Whadda you doing?”

Clint raises a skeptical eyebrow at him and responds, “Dying. Y’all always have such reclusive meeting sites? I had to scale a good fifty floors to get here.”

Wilson sneers at him through the mask. “How d’you think I feel hanging out around these two acrobatic fuckers all the time, eh? Only reason I’m still in any kind of shape’s ‘cause of them.”

Peter makes a racket with one of the guns behind them. Clint turns his head in time to see a magazine of bullets spill forth and roll in all directions across the rooftop. 

Wilson claws at his face and cries, “Peter, why?!”

Spidey’s suit lenses dilate. He picks up a handful of the bullets and tosses them at Wilson. “These ain’t rubber, bitch!”

Wilson moans and groans as he sets off to retrieve the scattered bullets. Clint takes pity on his crouched silhouette and gets up to help.

Daredevil shows face a couple of minutes later. He’s got a mean-looking scratch along a forearm and his rope bindings are shiny and crimson with fresh blood. His baton-grappling-hook-club comes closed in his wake with the significant hiss of metal against metal.

Clint wrinkles his nose at the sight of blood dripping down an elbow and returns to collecting bullets. Spidey yells some sort of nonsense and abandons his vigil at the gun bags to bug Daredevil.

The bullets are amassed and then concentrated into an emergency ziploc, which finds a home tucked into the bottom of one of the duffles.

Daredevil ignores Spidey’s ranting in order to maintain his intimidating aura of stoicism. He crosses his arms over his puffed out chest and strolls right past Peter’s animated gesticulations to nod cryptically at Clint.

Wilson pulls out a spiral notebook from a bag and flips to a page upon which a rough map of the layout of an office has been illustrated. He goes and sits with his legs crossed, then sets the map several feet before him like he expects them to gather for circle time.

Clint almost ignores it, but Daredevil and Spidey stop their song and dance when they notice Wilson being silent. They walk over in borderline terrifying synchrony and sit.

What the fuck is Clint supposed to do, not go and close the circle? 

Disgusting. This is peer pressure. Gaslighting.

He sits.

DP walks them through a ridiculously complicated plan to infiltrate the office building upon which they’re meeting. It involves shooting out windows in a particular pattern, superfluous grappling arrows (they’re not strong enough to carry all four of them at once, Wilson, no), and shooting an administrative assistant in the head with a rubber bullet. 

All to steal a couple of hard drives from some CEO’s desk.

Peter protests the final point of the plan, but he’s thoroughly and efficiently shot down by his teammates.

Clint tries to parse the dynamic going on in front of him. There’s a lot of cracking wise and getting into pissing contests over little details. Seems like Wilson’s the ring leader, although he and Daredevil tend to deliberate as if it’s a democracy. Peter’s either treated as an equal or fully ignored, depending on the content of his contribution.

Clint supplies a couple of things specific to his role in the mission, but for the most part he’s content to sit back and observe and absorb information.

It’s what he does best. Watch.

So watch he does.

Some things start to bop around in his head.

The familiar angle of the stubble on Daredevil’s frowning chin.

The way Wilson narrates shit about the building that should be obvious: lightswitch locations, what an elevator plaque is going to say, what to do if Daredevil reaches the computer first.

The care Daredevil’s fingers take as they trace the map etched into the paper. Scored, actually, when Clint takes a closer look. Like Deadpool pressed hard enough to break the nib of the pen he drew it with.

Ah, goddamn. 

It’s Murdock. That’s Murdock all wrapped up in the black suit and bloody ropes.

Murdock’s Daredevil. Or Daredevil’s Murdock. They’re the same person.

Clint is, as evidenced by this belated revelation, a piss poor intelligence operative.

Known the guy for years. Worked with him longer than that, on harder jobs than this.

How did he never get it? Not even a guess.

Fucking sleazy lawyers, yo.

Murdock stiffens under Clint’s sudden gaze. He draws his hand away from where it was reading the map and brings it to rest in his lap. Wilson and Spidey look up at him, and then at Clint.

It’s so damn quiet.

Peter breaks first. “Did you figure it out?”

Murdock whaps him with one of his knotted fists. He turns his head to Clint, expectant.

Shit, man. “How did I not connect the dots before?”

Murdock shrugs and grins a mean-spirited, shark-toothed lawyer grin. “I’m a great actor.”

Wilson fakes a belly laugh and informs him that he is the opposite of that.

Murdock looks a little put out. Spidey pats his upper arm and earns himself another whack. 

Clint comes to another realization. “Y’all set this up? So I’d find out?”

Wilson chuckles and says, “Don’t flatter yourself, sweet cheeks. We figured it’d happen one way or another. I needed an archer and Pete couldn’t get a hold of the other Hawkeye, who, I’ve been informed, is a younger, more capable, less crass version of you.”

Peter nods his mean little head and hums in affirmation.

Clint feels patronized. He lets it show on his face. “How many fucking times have I worked with you?” he aims, accusatory, at Murdock’s smug face.

“Too many to count,” that shit-eating grin responds.

Oh, he’s ticked. He is so fumed about this. “And how long? Have you been my fucking lawyer?”

“Long fuckin’ time, Barton. You’re really only observant when you want to be. I figured I’d been made when you found me in that barn with most of the suit on.”

Clint wracks his brain for a memory of that night, but all that comes up is a negative image of Murdock’s eyeless face, pools of blood, a ruined torso. The faded boxing robe that had all but fallen apart by the time he got there is the only textile he can recall. “Wasn’t really paying too much attention to what you were wearing, man.”

Peter cuts in to say, “To be fair, I don’t think anyone was.”

Murdock holds up his hands, conceding the point.

A thought occurs to Clint. “Is--is Nelson also secretly a vigilante?”

Wilson nearly wipes out off the side of the roof from the force of his mirthful, gasping laughter. Murdock has to grab onto an arm before it tumbles over the edge.

Clint’ll take that as a no, then. Spidey stops trying to contain his giggling.

Murdock pinches the bridge of his nose through the mask and says, “Lord, give me patience,” which sets Wilson off a second time. 

Clint feels the corners of his mouth tugging at the beginnings of a smile. Wilson’s rude, barking laugh is kind of infectious. He finds it easier and easier to laugh at himself as the seconds go by. He can see now why they work so well as a team.

In a couple of minutes, they’ve all laughed themselves calm. They get back to workshopping the final couple of loose threads at the end of the plan. Then they break to get into position, Deadpool gives the signal, and Clint looses an arrow into the first window.

He almost gets killed a couple of times, but they pull it off. 

Afterward, they nurse their wounds in Murdock and Wilson’s shared apartment (c’mon, Barton, it was right in front of you, they live together and everything, get your shit together) and Peter finagles his way into free takeout from down the road with a little help from the mask. 

Clint thinks he’d maybe like to start working with them a little more regularly. Get Kate in on it too. 

He’s absolutely positive she’s known Murdock’s other identity since the day she met him. The gal’s shrewd like that. 

Oh, how Clint is gonna be the butt of jokes for weeks after this.

But hey. The more the merrier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Discussion of depression, references to trauma inflicted in previous chapters
> 
> That marks the end of this work! Thanks for everyone who stuck through until now and who dealt with my sporadic upload schedule. Onto lighter, greener, less angsty pastures. I'm sick of wallowing around in it. Thanks so much for reading.

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to leave a comment or criticism below, they're what I subsist on :). I'm on Tumblr at [HueyHuee](https://hueyhuee.tumblr.com/).


End file.
